Indian Railways Approves ₹440 Crore Nimpura-Midnapur Third Line Project

Indian Railways has sanctioned a third line between Nimpura West Outer Cabin and Midnapur on the South Eastern Railway network, clearing a project estimated to cost ₹440 crore, the Press Information Bureau announced on Thursday.

The approval adds a new track to a section that handles a mix of passenger and freight traffic in West Bengal’s Paschim Medinipur district. By creating additional capacity, the third line is intended to ease congestion on the existing double-line stretch, allowing faster movement of trains through the corridor.

The South Eastern Railway zone, headquartered in Kolkata, will execute the work. The zone manages a dense network across West Bengal, Jharkhand, and Odisha, where capacity constraints on key trunk routes have long been a focus of infrastructure planning. The Nimpura–Midnapur section links the Kharagpur division’s yard approaches with the Midnapur station area, a node where suburban, long-distance, and goods services converge.

Railway officials have previously identified the Kharagpur–Midnapur corridor as a bottleneck for freight evacuation from the eastern coalfields and for maintaining punctuality of mail and express services. The new line is expected to provide operational flexibility for crossing and overtaking manoeuvres that are currently limited by the two-track configuration.

The ₹440 crore outlay covers construction of the formation, track laying, signalling and telecommunications systems, and associated civil works such as bridges and level-crossing upgrades. The PIB release did not specify a target completion date or the phasing of expenditure.

With the sanction in place, the zonal railway will now proceed to detailed design, tendering, and land acquisition where required. The project joins a series of third- and fourth-line works approved across the South Eastern Railway in recent years, part of a broader push to unlock line capacity on the Howrah–Mumbai and Howrah–Chennai main lines.