Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw visited the bustling construction site in Mumbai on Saturday, where he chatted with the hardworking team building the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train tunnels. He gave them a big thumbs-up for their latest success: a major breakthrough using the New Austrian Tunnelling Method (NATM) in the challenging undersea tunnel under Thane Creek.
Vaishnaw shook hands with the excited workers, who waved Indian national flags to mark the moment. “This is a huge milestone for the entire Mumbai-Ahmedabad high-speed rail project,” he told . The tunnel runs beneath the creek connecting Mumbai and Thane, and it’s a key part of linking the two cities faster.
Just the day before, a team from Japan stopped by to check on progress. They were impressed—over 320 kilometers of viaducts, those elevated bridge sections, are already done. Bridges crossing rivers are moving ahead quickly too, and the Sabarmati terminal in Ahmedabad is nearly finished.
This bullet train project promises to transform travel in India. Right now, the journey from Mumbai to Ahmedabad takes about seven to eight hours by regular train. But once complete, you’ll zip there in just two hours flat. Cities along the route, like Thane, Vapi, Surat, Vadodara, and Anand, will see a big economic boost from all the new connections.
Vaishnaw shared exciting plans for the service: trains running every 30 minutes during peak morning and evening hours, with goals to ramp up to every 10 minutes. “Forget booking tickets in advance,” he said. “Just head to the station, hop on a train within 10 minutes, and arrive in Ahmedabad in two hours. It’s a game-changer for how we travel.”
Diving into the details, this breakthrough happened in a tough 5-kilometer tunnel section between Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC) and Shilphata. The full stretch measures 4.881 kilometers, including a tricky 7-kilometer part under Thane Creek. Work kicked off in May 2024, and engineers hit their first win on July 9 with a 2.7-kilometer continuous breakthrough linking an access tunnel to the Savali shaft.
Now, excavation is fully wrapped up from the Savali shaft to the Shilphata portal, setting the stage to connect this tunnel to the viaducts in the Mumbai-Ahmedabad High-Speed Rail (MAHSR) project. To speed things up, crews built an Additional Driven Intermediate Tunnel (ADIT), letting them dig from both the Ghansoli and Shilphata ends at the same time.
The India bullet train project keeps pushing forward, bringing high-speed dreams closer to reality for millions.
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