New Delhi, Oct. 24 -- Imagine sitting in a train as it glides out of a mountain tunnel and, suddenly, there is nothing beneath you but air. Far below, the Chenab River glints like a silver thread. You are crossing the highest railway bridge in the world, taller than the Eiffel Tower.

That journey of a few minutes took the nation more than seventy years to make possible. This is the story of how it happened, and of the small part my team and I were lucky enough to play in it.

A Line Cut in Two

When India won its independence in 1947, Jammu and Kashmir had just one railway link with the rest of the country: a line running from Jammu to Sialkot. Partition drew the new border right across it. Overnight, Sialkot was in Pakistan, and the state was left with no railway at all.

It took about 25 years before trains reached Jammu again. Work on the next stretch, up to Udhampur, began in 1983 and crawled on for more than two decades. Everyone dreamed of a line going all the way to Srinagar. A survey had even been done. But the mountains were so forbidding and the cost so enormous that the dream stayed on paper.

The Job Nobody Wanted

Then, around 1994-95, the government suddenly decided it could wait no longer. Northern Railway, still busy laying track to Udhampur, was told to start pushing on towards Kashmir at once.

But before a single rail can be laid, engineers need a detailed plan of the route: location of every station, tunnel and bridge, and what it would all cost. This is called the Final Location Survey. Normally it means teams of surveyors walking every metre of the ground.

Here, that ground was dense forest, towering mountains and, in those years, a hotbed of militancy. RITES, the Railways' own survey agency, declined the job. Other firms didn't even reply.

That's when the call came to me.

I had recently retired as Adviser, Civil Engineering, at the Railway Board and set up a small consultancy, Consultants Combine. We had just finished writing a track maintenance manual for Malaysian Railways. Now the head of Northern Railway's construction wing was asking: would we take on the survey nobody else would touch?

I said yes. Some called it brave; others called it foolish. I called it the chance of a lifetime.

Mapping Mountains from the Sky

Since we couldn't safely send people into those hills, we decided to survey them from above, using satellite images and aerial photographs.

For that, we teamed up with Hyderabad Mapset, a company led by Major Navin Chandra, who had studied this very science, remote sensing for engineering surveys, in the Netherlands. After long rounds of discussion, the Railway Board accepted our bid. We would plan the entire line, stations, tunnels, bridges and all, without setting foot on most of it. The builders would fine-tune the details later on the ground.

A Wrong Road Avoided

Our first step was to study the earlier survey. What we found worried us.

To get through the mountains quickly, the old route used very sharp bends and very steep slopes. Trains on such a route could never go faster than about 50 km an hour, and the line would choke on its own traffic forever. Worse, on slopes that steep, a train whose brakes fail can run away downhill. Railways guard against this with "catch sidings", escape tracks that trap a runaway train. But among those gorges and cliffs, there was simply no room to build them.

So we did something bold: we threw out the old route and went looking for a new one.

Hours spent poring over satellite images paid off. We found a path with gentle curves and gradual slopes, gentle enough that trains could run at full speed and no escape tracks would be needed. It was slightly longer, but it passed through Katra, the base town for millions of pilgrims to Mata Vaishno Devi. That meant the line would carry plenty of passengers and earn its keep.

The Railway Board examined it closely and approved it. The line running today follows that route, refined by later surveys on the ground.

The River That Bends

One giant obstacle remained: the Chenab.

Along our route, the river runs at the bottom of a deep gorge. To keep the line climbing steadily towards the valley, the bridge would have to leap across more than a kilometre, at a height of about 360 metres above the water.

There was another catch. A bridge is easiest to design and build when it crosses a river straight across, at right angles. Cross at a slant and the bridge gets longer and far harder to engineer. We searched until we found the perfect spot: a place where the river takes a sudden turn, letting the line cross it head-on.

Was such a bridge even possible? On a visit to the USA, I carried a drawing of the gorge to the New York office of Mr Birdsall, of the famous bridge designers Steinman, Boynton, Gronquist and Birdsall. He studied it and said, confidently: Yes, it could be a suspension bridge, a cable-stayed bridge or a steel arch. We communicated these views to the Railways.

The Long Wait

We delivered our survey on time. And then. nothing.

The urgency had vanished as mysteriously as it had arrived. Politics, perhaps, once again. People began asking whether a railway to Srinagar was worth such a huge cost. There wasn't even enough money to finish the line to Udhampur.

For years, our maps gathered dust.

The turning point came in 2002, when the Kashmir rail link was declared a national project. Now it would be paid for from the national budget, not just the Railways' own. Suddenly the work came alive. The Jammu-Udhampur line was finished by 2006. In the valley itself, trains began running between Qazigund and Baramulla in 2009. In 2014, the line reached Katra, and pilgrims across India celebrated direct trains from Delhi.

With peace returning to the region, surveyors could finally walk the ground. RITES was brought back to fine-tune the plans. They broadly followed our route and improved it in places. But the Chenab crossing? Even after the most thorough checks on the ground, nobody could find a better spot. Our site stayed exactly where we had marked it.

The Bridge Rises

The hardest stretch, from Katra to Qazigund, was almost entirely tunnels and bridges, and the Chenab was its biggest test.

The final design was a giant steel arch, a rainbow of steel springing from one cliff to the other, with the track resting on top. Building it took some of the best minds in the world. Afcons Infrastructure led the construction, with partners from India and South Korea. Designers came from Finland, Germany and Austria. Experts from IISc Bangalore and the IITs at Delhi and Roorkee made sure the mountain slopes would hold. DRDO helped make it blast-proof. The steel came from SAIL, and Konkan Railway oversaw the whole effort on behalf of Northern Railway.

In June 2025, the Prime Minister inaugurated the Chenab Bridge along with the complete line to Srinagar. For the country, it was a moment of pride. For my small team, it was sheer joy.

Built to Last

What makes this bridge so special? In plain terms:

It is the highest railway bridge in the world: 359 metres above the river, about 35 metres taller than the Eiffel Tower, and 1,315 metres long.

It can withstand winds of up to 260 km an hour and the strongest earthquakes expected in the region.

The rock beneath it has been pinned together with giant steel bolts.

Its deck can survive a powerful explosion, and even if one of its supports is damaged, trains can still creep across safely.

A network of sensors constantly takes its pulse, warning engineers of trouble long before it becomes dangerous.

It is coated against rust and built to last 120 years.

A Blessing at Katra

The real heroes are the engineers of Indian Railways, who drew on skills from across the world and completed this line through some of the toughest terrains and toughest times.

But I cannot help feeling there was a higher hand at work. The original plan would have taken the line straight towards Patnitop, bypassing Katra. Had the old surveyed route been followed, we would have had a rail line that is slow, steep and limited forever. And, the devotees of Mata Vaishno Devi might still be waiting for their train.

Instead, we turned the route towards Katra. I like to believe the Devi wished it so, and that our little consultancy was blessed to carry out her wish. The magnificent bridge over the Chenab simply followed.

Had we not changed course, posterity would rightly have blamed us for short-sightedness. Today, every train that floats across the Chenab tells a happier story.

Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.