Freight trains plying daily on the Western Dedicated Freight Corridor (WDFC) are expected to increase by 65 per cent once the remaining 102-kilometre long section connecting Jawaharlal Nehru Port (JNP) in Maharashtra to the DFC gets completed by December 2025, officials said Friday.
“Currently, 300 trains ply daily on the WDFC and another 400 trains run on the Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor —- between Ludhiana and Sonnagar. But once the WDFC gets completed, the number of trains will rise to 500 per day,” Manish Awasthy, Chief General Manager of Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India Ltd (DFCCIL) said.
The Dedicated Freight Corridor with a total length of 2843 kilometres passes through 9 states. Of these 1506 kilometres is WDFC and the remaining is EDFC. While 100 per cent of EDFC is complete, only 1404 kilometres or 93.2 percent of the WDFC has been completed. “The project encountered land acquisition issues in Maharashtra and so the 102 kilometres between Vaitarna and Jawaharlal Nehru Port continues to be under construction. We expect it to be completed by the revised deadline of December 2025,” Awasthy added.
Currently the WDFC passing through Gujarat operates Trucks-on-Trains that carries 25 wagons loaded with Amul milk trucks from Palanput to Rewari in just 10 hours. “Freight trains on the Indian Railway network operate at 32-34 kilometres per hour (kmph). On WDFC we have achieved an average speed of 60 kmph and our target is to reach 75 kmph when JNP gets connected,” the official said adding that the DFC has been able to reduce the container and Exim cargo traffic transit time by almost 50 per cent. The operations of the entire WDFC is managed from a single location in Ahmedabad where a Train Operational Control Centre has been set up.