The challenge was to do it within a tight deadline of 60 days. In the end, Railways in fact did it in just 58 days, as the broken bridge in the mountains of Eastern Ghats stood restored before time on Friday. On October 6-7, a 700-ton boulder fell on the half-a-decade-old “bridge number 249” in the Araku Valley region of Andhra Pradesh; shattered its pier and rendered the country’s highest broad-gauge freight line useless.
Within five days, work started to restore the bridge on war footing keeping a never-before 60-day deadline, putting to test Indian Railways’ engineering capability, and its ability to deliver on time. Incidentally, the bridge work coincided with time the Army was called in to build three foot overbridges in Mumbai’s suburban network in what was viewed by a section of railway bureaucracy as a snub to the national transporter’s engineering prowess.
Around 400 labourers worked day and night as zonal railways incurred a cost of just about Rs 7 crore to get the bridge restored. According to East Coast Railway, this is a record. “This is the record of any bridge work done in so short a period,” said a statement issued by the zonal railway Friday.
 

The challenge was to do it within a tight deadline of 60 days. In the end, Railways in fact did it in just 58 days, as the broken bridge in the mountains of Eastern Ghats stood restored before time on Friday. On October 6-7, a 700-ton boulder fell on the half-a-decade-old “bridge number 249” in the Araku Valley region of Andhra Pradesh; shattered its pier and rendered the country’s highest broad-gauge freight line useless.
Within five days, work started to restore the bridge on war footing keeping a never-before 60-day deadline, putting to test Indian Railways’ engineering capability, and its ability to deliver on time. Incidentally, the bridge work coincided with time the Army was called in to build three foot overbridges in Mumbai’s suburban network in what was viewed by a section of railway bureaucracy as a snub to the national transporter’s engineering prowess.
Around 400 labourers worked day and night as zonal railways incurred a cost of just about Rs 7 crore to get the bridge restored. According to East Coast Railway, this is a record. “This is the record of any bridge work done in so short a period,” said a statement issued by the zonal railway Friday.