CM KCR to lay stone for airport express metro line today

Hyderabad: Another major infrastructure scheme is coming up to provide hassle-free transportation in the city. Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao will lay the foundation for the Airport Express Metro Corridor on Friday.

For the upcoming project Metro corridor-4 phase II a new station will be built at Raidurgam, stated N V S Reddy, managing director of Hyderabad Metro Rail Ltd (HMRL), at a meeting.

Highlighting the tentative alignment of the project, he said, "very soon citizens of Hyderabad will be experiencing a completely different journey while traveling from corridor -4. The existing vlue line that ends in the Raidurg terminal Metro station 0.9 km line will be extended.

A new Raidurg Airport Metro station will be built on 15 acres of land owned by L&T Metro Rail, which may be used, yet the exact area has not been decided. There is a space near the left side of Khajaguda lake, (waiting for building permission) and it will be taken forward to Nanakramguda, Narsingi, TS Police Academy and Rajendranagar.

It will directly touch Shamshabad Airport where around 2.5 km of the stretch will be underground, while 27.5 km of the total 31-km distance is to be elevated Metro. Between the elevated and underground, about 1 km will be at grade or road level."

Also it will be a beautiful experience with lightweight aerodynamic coaches and more improved and latest technologies for corridor -4. The Airport Metro will have more seating arrangements, like an AC chair car of railways with much better features. Initially, the Airport Metro will have three-coach trains. Later, it will be upgraded to six-coaches. While the average speed of the City metro is about 36 kmph with a maximum speed of 80 kmph, the Airport Metro will run at a maximum speed of 120 kmph. With very few stops, it can cover the entire 31 km stretch in 26 minutes. That is less than half of what it takes to travel to the airport by road, Reddy added.

Sharing brief idea of how the Airport Metro stations will be designed, the MD said, they will have an information desk. Flight information display (FID) boards will be installed at all the stations. Later the facility will be extended to all Metro stations. Each station will have automatic Fare Collection (AFC) gates and single smart tickets integrated with the City Metro and other transport modes will be introduced.

To ensure passenger safety, half-height platform screen doors will be installed. Coaches will be made of lightweight stainless steel and aluminum and better aerodynamic mechanisms will be used for higher speed. All trains will be air-conditioned;coaches will have LCD screens with route map indicators. For flawless signaling, sophisticated technologies like communication-based train control systems(CBTC) will be used. After the stations are build, initially in peak hours, frequency of trains will in every eight minutes and , non-peak hours every 20 minutes. Once the usage increase the frequency will be every 2.25 minutes, non-peak hours every five minutes.