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Indian Railways is to convert seven high-density routes covering about 11,000 km into four-line, or quadruple-track, corridors, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced.
These routes make up about 16 per cent of the national route length but carry roughly 41 per cent of all railway traffic.
The seven corridors are Delhi-Howrah, Howrah-Chennai, Chennai-Mumbai, Mumbai-Delhi, Delhi-Chennai, Mumbai-Howrah and Delhi-Guwahati.
Quadrupling adds two lines to an existing double-line route, allowing freight and passenger services to run on separate pairs of tracks.
Construction is already under way on major sections, with only a small part of the network awaiting final Detailed Project Report approval.
A double-line section gives one track in each direction, so a slow freight train and a fast passenger train must share the same path and one waits for the other. Quadrupling adds two more lines, creating four parallel tracks, which lets the operator dedicate one pair to freight and the other to passenger services. Capacity therefore rises by more than the simple doubling of tracks would suggest, because the mixing of speeds - the real constraint on a congested Indian corridor - is removed. This is different from doubling (two tracks) and tripling (three), and it is why quadrupling is reserved for the busiest sections.
Simple Analogy: A two-lane road where a truck holds up every car behind it. Adding two lanes and sending trucks down one pair and cars down the other moves far more traffic than the extra tarmac alone would explain.
General Awareness > Indian Railways - network, projects and terminology
General Awareness > Infrastructure and Current Affairs
General Awareness > Infrastructure Current Affairs
GS Paper III > Infrastructure - railways, ports and roads
Adding two lines to an existing double-line route to create four parallel tracks on one corridor.
A section carrying large volumes of passengers and freight, prioritised for track addition, electrification and signalling upgrades.
The standard planning and costing document prepared before a large infrastructure project receives final approval.
Freight-only rail lines - the Eastern DFC (Ludhiana-Sonnagar) and Western DFC (JNPT-Dadri) - built to take goods traffic off passenger routes.