The Konkan Railway Route

The konkan railway route starts from Roha to Thokur covering the states Maharashtra, Goa and Karnataka.It has scenic beauty all around its route.The giant and small rivers,tunnels,greenery,villages,waterfalls all you can see in your trip.The route was an engineerng task undertaken and executed well ahead of time by our engineers under the leadership of E.Shreedharan.The track is designed to handle the speed of a train below 160kmph.Hence they have taken care to avoid curves in most of the route.

There are around 1998 bridges , including major and minor bridges along the route.The longest bridge is across the river Sharavati near Honnavar and it is around 2.065 km long.Usually I travel by Netravati Express and it crosses the bridge at odd hours both up and down.The tallest viaduct(bridge composed of several small spans) PanvelNadi ,near Ratnagiri is around 64 metre height and is also the tallest one in Asia.The Karbude tunnel streching for 6km is the longest one in this route .

If you travel by Sleeper class , then you will be annoyed by the resonance sound caused when train moves fast inside the train.You may hear whistle sounds given by staff on duty inside the tunnel.Another irritating thing can be the smoke coming out of the engine when train enters the tunnel.In a tunnel , you have to turn the face away from the window and you are forced to look at your fellow travellers.One may see water flowing from the top , inside the tunnel.

Travelling during monsoon season may extend your travelling time to any extend.Konkan railway has installed devices to detect any probable occurance of landslide along the route.One may see steel nettings on the side where there is vulnarability of rock fall.The konkan railway route can be found in wikimapia website.One can see the tunnels,bridges on the route.

One thing I dont like in this route is the non availability of food in the stations except at Madgaon.One have to depend on pantry car.Vendors may bring local items like chikki, dry grapes , cashew etc..I have tried dry grapes once, I dont find it good enough.It may appear cheap.

The Konkan railway has designed a webpage so that one may find the position of the train in the Konkan route.The URL is "http://www.konkanrailway.com/website/visual/train_position.html" .