It Took 28 Years, 36 Tunnels and the World's Highest Railway Bridge to Put Kashmir on India's Train Map

The first trains to run in the Kashmir valley arrived by road. When Northern Railway built the line from Qazigund to Baramulla, it finished before anything connected it to the rest of India, so every locomotive and coach was carried in on the highway and put back together on the far side of the mountains.

By October 2009 that 119 km line was fully working, and it went nowhere. A 2013 government release called it what it was, an “island railway.” You could ride from Baramulla through Srinagar to Qazigund, and there the tracks stopped against the Pir Panjal range.

It took until 6 June 2025 to finish the job. That day Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened the last stretch of the Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla Rail Link, known as the USBRL, and flagged off two Vande Bharat trains between Katra and Srinagar. The ride takes about three hours, two to three hours less than the road.

A dream first floated in 1898

The British raised the idea of a railway into the valley with the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir in 1898. Survey teams worked on routes for about eleven years, and the plan was shelved for good after Maharaja Pratap Singh died in 1925. None of the colonial railway, which India ended up paying for itself, ever crossed the Pir Panjal.

The modern project was sanctioned in 1994-95. Prime Ministers H D Deve Gowda and I K Gujral laid foundation stones in 1996 and 1997, work began in 1997, and in 2002 the line was declared a national project. It was budgeted then at about ₹2,500 crore (a crore is 10 million).

The final bill was ₹43,780 crore. For that, India got 272 km of railway with 36 tunnels adding up to 119 km, and 943 bridges. The estimate kept climbing as the work dragged on; as late as March 2023 the government put it at ₹37,012 crore.

The line opened in pieces. The valley section came first, between 2008 and 2009, then Banihal in 2013, Udhampur to Katra in 2014, Banihal to Sangaldan in February 2024, and the last gap, Sangaldan to Katra, in June 2025.

The first crossing of the Pir Panjal

The island ended in June 2013, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh flagged off a train from Banihal through tunnel T-80, 11.2 km long, bored straight through the Pir Panjal.

The road between Banihal and Qazigund is 35 km long and depends on the Jawahar road tunnel, which snow often shuts in winter. The railway does the same trip in 17.7 km, most of it underground. At the time T-80 was the longest transport tunnel in India.

It was fitted out for trouble deep inside the mountain. The 2013 government release lists CCTV cameras every 62.5 metres, fire hydrants every 125 metres, emergency telephones every 250 metres, a 3 metre road running beside the track for rescue crews and a separate 772 metre escape tunnel. The whole 17.7 km section cost ₹1,691 crore.

That still left a train from Srinagar stuck at Banihal, 111 km short of Katra, with the hardest ground on the whole route in between.

The rock that would not hold still

On the Katra to Banihal section, 97 of the 111 km are in tunnels and another 7 km are on four major bridges. That leaves almost nothing on open ground.

The rock in these young mountains is badly broken. Tunnel T-1, a 3.2 km bore at the foot of the Trikuta hills near Katra, runs through what the Daily Excelsior report on its breakthrough described as “highly jointed and fractured dolomite.” For 300 to 350 metres it crosses the Main Boundary Thrust, a major fault zone, with heavy water pouring in.

The New Austrian Tunnelling Method, used for tunnels such as T-50, could not cope there. Engineers described “flowing conditions,” loose, waterlogged ground that flowed instead of holding its shape. So the Konkan Railway crews switched to a different sequence. They drove deep drainage pipes to pull the water out, pushed an umbrella of pipes into the rock above the face before digging under it, injected chemical grout to bind the loose ground, bolted the face itself, and excavated in several small drifts instead of one big one.

Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw gave the approach a name. “We have innovatively developed (I)-TM as Himalayan tunnelling method for tunnelling through the Himalayan geology to build tunnels in Jammu and Kashmir,” he said in October 2023. The T-1 breakthrough through the fault came that December.

Twelve kilometres under the mountain

The longest tunnel on the line is T-50, 12.77 km between Khari and Sumber, which opened with the Banihal to Sangaldan section in February 2024. The government’s June 2025 note calls it the longest transportation tunnel in India, and it is still the longest one carrying trains. A 14.57 km rail tunnel in Uttarakhand broke through in April 2025 but was not due to open before December 2026.

T-50 runs through quartzite, gneiss and phyllite, and the crews fought water, landslides and shear zones, places where the rock has already cracked and slid. To speed things up they dug three side tunnels, called adits, so they could attack the main bore from several faces at once. A parallel escape tunnel runs alongside, linked by cross-passages every 375 metres, and CCTV cameras watch the tube every 50 metres.

Just reaching the work took its own construction project. Indian Railways built 215 km of approach roads to get men and machines to the sites, roads that villages along the line now use too.

India’s first railway bridge hung from cables

The Chenab bridge, 359 metres above the river and the highest railway arch bridge in the world, gets the headlines, and we have written about it separately. Its smaller neighbour deserves more attention than it gets.

The Anji Khad bridge, south of the Chenab, is India’s first cable-stayed railway bridge. It crosses 725 metres of the deep Anji river valley, about 80 km from Jammu, hung from 96 high-tensile cables that run down from a single inverted Y-shaped pylon standing 193 metres above its foundation. Laid end to end, the cable strands in it would stretch 653 km.

More than 8,200 tonnes of structural steel went into it, and the Railways ministry says the bridge was built to take tremors, strong winds and shifting ground in what its own note calls “young, restless mountains.”

What the trains changed

The trains filled up. By the end of 2025 the two Vande Bharat pairs on the route had carried almost 3.75 lakh (375,000) passengers, according to the Jammu railway division. The Railways said in April 2026 that the train had run at full capacity since launch, and it lengthened the sets from 8 coaches to 20.

On 30 April 2026 the service was extended to Jammu Tawi, the region’s main railhead. The morning train from Jammu covers about 266 km to Srinagar in four hours and fifty minutes, stopping at Katra, Reasi and Banihal. A pilgrim can now go from Jammu to the Vaishno Devi base camp at Katra and on to Srinagar without changing trains. The ministry pitched this at pilgrims who pair Vaishno Devi with the Amarnath Yatra, whose base camps at Pahalgam and Baltal are reached from Srinagar.

When the highway failed the apple growers

The line got its first real test in the apple harvest of 2025. In late summer, damage to the Jammu to Srinagar highway between Tharad and Balli Nallah in Udhampur district left hundreds of fruit trucks stranded, and growers put their losses above ₹1,200 crore.

The railway started a daily parcel service on 11 September, and on 15 September the Lieutenant Governor flagged off a train of eight parcel vans from the valley to Adarsh Nagar in Delhi, each van carrying up to 23 tonnes. By the end of the year the Jammu division had moved more than 20,000 tonnes of Kashmiri apples by rail.

Many traders still send their apples by truck. Traders’ union leaders told ETV Bharat in August 2026 that the train reaches Delhi in about 24 hours against two days by truck, but it means extra loading and unloading, extra charges and damaged cartons. A truck can drive straight on to markets in Mumbai, Goa or Tamil Nadu. The parcel trains stop in Delhi.

The train that follows the snowplough

Winter is where the road loses. Heavy snow can close the Jammu to Srinagar highway for days at a stretch, and the railway was built to keep going through it. Almost half of the line runs inside the mountains, out of the snow.

The trains needed their own engineering for that. The Integral Coach Factory in Chennai fitted the Kashmir Vande Bharat sets to run in temperatures as low as minus 20 degrees Celsius. The driver’s windscreen has heating elements built into it. Silicone heating pads sit under the water tanks and bio-toilet tanks, the water pipes carry self-regulating heating cables, and an auto-drain empties them when the train stands idle so ice cannot block them. A heated air dryer keeps the brakes working in the cold, and dedicated 5 kVA transformers under the floor power all of it.

On a snowy morning, a snow-clearing train goes up the line first and clears the track. Behind it comes the Vande Bharat, windscreen warm and pipes heated, on its way to Srinagar.