India’s Vizhinjam railway tunnel adopts Austrian tunneling method

India’s Vizhinjam railway tunnel adopts Austrian tunneling method: The third longest railway tunnel in India, the Vizhinjam railway tunnel will adopt the New Austrian Tunnelling Method (NATM) for undertaking the tunneling works. The work scheduled to begin in January will take 36 months for the completion of tunnelling work alone plus three months of initial installation work and another 3 months for track lining and commissioning, taking a total of 42 months for the entire work.

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This tunnel connects the under-construction Vizhinjam International Seaport.

It is being developed by the Adani Port with the railway mainline at Balaramapuram near Thiruvananthapuram.

India’s largest 12.75 km long railway tunnel (T-49) is built as part of the Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramula Rail Link (USBRL). Instead of using the expensive tunnel boring machine (TBM), Vizhinjam International Seaport Limited (VISL) which is implementing the Vizhinjam deep water multipurpose seaport on a PPP basis, adopted the cost-effective NATM method which uses a modern drilling and blasting technique.