Elphinstone Road station gets new FOB: To ease commuter woes, link to Parel station
The FOB was opened for passengers on Wednesday without any ceremony (Picture Courtesy: Rajendra B. Aklekar)
Western Railway on Wednesday threw open a 73-metre-long and 6-metre-wide foot-over bridge (FOB) at Elphinstone Road station, providing some much-needed relief to commuters travelling via Elphinstone Road and Parel stations.
Work on the FOB was initiated on September 29 last year, the day on which a stampede at Elphinstone Road (Prabhadevi) FOB staircase killed 23 people.
The FOB will enable commuters to travel between Elphinstone Road and Parel stations from both ends. It also connects Parel station and new platforms of Parel Terminus.
The FOB opening came a day after a part of Gokhale Bridge, a road overbridge (ROB) in Andheri (East), collapsed amid rains, bringing train services of the Western Railway to a halt for several hours.
Western Railway Chief PRO Ravinder Bhakar said the FOB construction work got over a day earlier and it was opened for passengers on Wednesday without any “ceremony”.
“The FOB has been built at a cost of Rs 9.85 crore and is in addition to the FOB constructed by the Army recently at the northern end,” Bhakar said.
Western Railway had floated the work tender on November 6, 2017 and the Letter of Acceptance was issued the next day. The construction work commenced on November 8.
Two girders on the Western Railway portion of the bridge were launched in March and April 2018.
The FOB work was completed in record time despite constraints like the removal of encroachments, shifting of utilities, cutting and trimming trees and rains obstructing the work.
The FOB is “passenger-friendly” and less prone to corrosion. The FOB material is a single skin elf-supported aluminium standing seam roofing system.
It is reportedly made up of 0.9 mm thickness of aluminium alloy with Polyvinylidene Fluoride (PVDF) coating on the exposed surface. This material has been imported from Dubai and has been given curvature in India depending on the shape of the roof.
“These sheets will have a better durability and will be free from leakages,” Bhakar said, adding that the sheeting surface has been designed in such a manner that solar panels can also be fitted on them.
