India's most expensive railway project — 28 years and ₹28,000 crore in the making — was completed on 6 June 2025. The Chenab Rail Bridge stands 359 metres above the gorge below. The Eiffel Tower would fit underneath with room to spare.
There is a bridge in Kashmir that no train had ever crossed before 6 June 2025. It stands 359 metres above the Chenab river — taller than the Eiffel Tower by 35 metres — and carries a railway line that took the better part of three decades to build. On that morning, Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagged off the first Vande Bharat Express trains from Katra. Kashmir had its all-weather connection to the rest of India. The wait was over.
Twenty-eight years in the making
The Udhampur–Srinagar–Baramulla Rail Link (USBRL) is 272 kilometres long. Indian Railways began planning it in 1997. It was not finished until 2025. Twenty-eight years. The delay is not hard to explain when you look at the terrain: the Kashmir Valley is ringed by the Himalayas, lies in one of the most seismically active zones in Asia, and is accessible overland only through mountain passes that close in winter. Engineers had to drive tunnels through unstable geology, build viaducts over gorges, and solve problems that had no precedent in Indian engineering. The project cost has been reported at over ₹28,000 crore, making it the most expensive single railway project in Indian history.
The bridge that rewrote the record books
The Chenab Rail Bridge is the centrepiece of the USBRL and the reason engineers spent years debating whether it could be built at all. Its central arch spans 1,315 metres and rises 359 metres above the riverbed — the world's highest railway arch bridge, beating the previous record-holder in China. Constructing it required 28,660 tonnes of steel. The bridge is designed to survive 260 km/h winds, magnitude-8 earthquakes, and has a design life of 120 years. It also carries a 780-metre blast-protection platform, an Indian engineering first.
To put the height in perspective: if you stood on the railway tracks at the apex of the bridge and dropped a stone, it would fall for more than eight seconds before hitting the water below. The Eiffel Tower (324 metres) would fit underneath the arch with 35 metres of clearance. Qutub Minar (73 metres) could stack nearly five times inside the gorge.
Not just one record — several
The USBRL includes more than one engineering landmark. The Anji Khad Bridge, which crosses a Himalayan tributary on the same line, is India's first cable-stayed railway bridge — a different structural type from the Chenab arch, using cables radiating from towers to support the deck. The line also includes the Banihal Qazigund tunnel at 12.77 kilometres, the longest railway tunnel in India when it opened.
Taken together — the highest arch bridge, the first cable-stayed rail bridge, the longest tunnel — the USBRL is a catalogue of Indian engineering firsts concentrated in one project.
What changes on the ground
Before the line opened, the only reliable land route to the Kashmir Valley ran through the Jawahar Tunnel and the Banihal Pass. Both close in heavy snow, sometimes for days at a time, cutting the valley off from the rest of the country. The train changes that. Katra to Srinagar by bus was roughly six hours on a good day, longer in bad weather. By the new Vande Bharat Express, the journey takes approximately three hours — and runs through tunnels that snow cannot close.
For ordinary Kashmiris, the most significant thing about the railway is not the engineering superlatives. It is that the train runs in January.
Perspective from Bengaluru
The USBRL's 28-year timeline invites comparison with other long infrastructure projects. Namma Metro's Phase 1 — the original Purple and Green lines — took roughly a decade from sanction to passenger service. The Yellow Line, approved in 2014 and opened in August 2025, required eleven years and the navigation of a pandemic. Both feel long from the inside.
The Kashmir railway took nearly three times as long, through terrain that most engineers would have considered impossible at the outset. When the Chenab Bridge opened, it was not just a record — it was the culmination of a generation's worth of persistence against geography, geology, and time.
India got there in the end.