The National High Speed Rail Corporation Limited said on 12 October 2026 that all 14 portal beams over the Delhi–Mumbai Rajdhani rail corridor in Vadodara, Gujarat, have been completed, as part of the Mumbai–Ahmedabad bullet train project. The milestone allows the installation of 40-metre composite girders and moves forward the construction of the elevated viaduct, according to Hindusthan Samachar’s report on the NHSRCL statement.
The beams are large. Each is about 37 metres long and about 4 metres high and wide, and weighs about 1,500 tonnes, the corporation said. Building one took 590 cubic metres of concrete and 55 tonnes of reinforcing steel. The beams were cast in place, directly above operating railway tracks, which required heavy-duty cranes, hydraulic jacks, long-reach concrete pumps and precision surveying equipment, and scheduled railway operation blocks coordinated with Indian Railways.
The Vadodara section spans 8.3 kilometres and crosses five Indian Railways tracks, including two main lines. Of the 14 beams, 10 are positioned toward Surat, between the Vadodara bullet train station and Vishwamitri station, and four are toward Ahmedabad, between Vadodara and Chhayapuri stations. The location is important because the high-speed line has to cross one of the busiest railway corridors in the country without disturbing its traffic.
The milestone sits within a larger project. The Mumbai–Ahmedabad High-Speed Rail corridor is India’s first dedicated bullet train line, running 508 kilometres through Maharashtra, Gujarat and Dadra and Nagar Haveli with Japanese Shinkansen technology. According to a progress report cited in September 2026, about 62.16 percent of the corridor’s work was complete as of 27 August 2026. In Gujarat, all seven civil packages, C1 to C7, are under active construction, according to search summaries of project trackers, and the first section from Bilimora to Surat is expected to be operational in 2027.
Other recent milestones include a 480-metre bridge over the Sabarmati River in Ahmedabad, which project trackers listed as completed. The reports reviewed do not give the dates of those milestones, and the 2027 opening target comes from secondary sources, not from the NHSRCL statement. IndiaX24 therefore treats the 2027 date as a target, not a commitment.
The scale is easy to underestimate. Fourteen beams of about 1,500 tonnes each add up to roughly 21,000 tonnes, and with 590 cubic metres of concrete and 55 tonnes of steel in each beam, the 14 together used about 8,260 cubic metres of concrete and 770 tonnes of reinforcing steel, by IndiaX24’s arithmetic from the NHSRCL figures. All this was built directly over live railway tracks.
For the project the Vadodara beams mean that the next stage, lifting the 40-metre girders into place over the tracks, can begin. That will again need railway blocks and careful coordination. Land acquisition and past delays have affected the project’s schedule, and the progress percentage is a measure of work done, not of the date on which trains will run. IndiaX24 will report on the girder launching, on further NHSRCL updates and on the first-section opening date once it is officially announced.
Featured image: The Sabarmati River in Ahmedabad (file photo, 2020; the bullet train project also has a river bridge here). Photo by Brihaspati, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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