Keeping in mind the hurdles that may arise due to land acquisition issues, the railways might reduce the number of coaches of trains from 15 to eight for the Oval Maidan-Virar elevated corridor. According to officials, small trains will ease the issue of land acquisition for station premises.
Western Railway (WR) engineers said that while the length of the trains will be reduced, the frequency of the trains would be increased to cope with the number of passengers. A senior WR officer, who is working on the multi-crore project, said, “The frequency of the eight-coach train will be every two minutes, instead of running 15-coach trains every three minutes.
With less number of coaches, we would need less area for constructing stations. This has been done to eliminate the hurdles that may arise due to land acquisition.” It has been observed that land acquisition has many delayed infrastructure projects in the past. For the 60-kilometre Oval Maidan-Virar elevated corridor, authorities
plan to acquire 25 hectares of land, out of which 10 hectares is under private ownership. There will be 26 stations on the route.
In order to generate revenue, authorities are planning commercial exploitation of the land by building multi-storey towers on the existing stations.
The project has an estimated a cost of `21,000 crore and is expected to be completed by 2019. The corridor will run underground, elevated and on the ground level and will be constructed above the existing WR lines.
The corridor will go underground from Oval Maidan to Mahalaxmi, and then from there, it will run at an elevated level for 42 kilometre of the remaining 55 kilometres from Borivali to Virar.
The elevated corridor will be 15 to 10 meters high at places. The elevated corridor has been planned, as the suburban section is saturated.