70 years on, passenger rail link to Khulna resumes

PETRAPOLE: Till Friday, Petrapole was a nondescript railway station through which six or seven freight trains crossed over to Bangladesh every month. All of this changed on Saturday, and there was reason for this. After nearly seven decades, Khulna in Bangladesh got back passenger rail connectivity with Kolkata.

According to

Eastern Railway

(ER) officials, the passenger rail link between Kolkata and Khulna lasted till 1947.

Around 12.30pm on Saturday, PM Narendra Modi and his Bangladeshi counterpart Sheikh Hasina flagged off the trial run of Maitree-2 between Khulna and Kolkata. The train, waiting at Benapole station, was hauled in by a diesel locomotive sent from Petrapole by ER around 1.40pm. There were 42 people on board, all of them Bangladesh government officials. Commercial services between Kolkata and Khulna are expected to start from July. This will be the second passenger train service between India and Bangladesh after the

Maitree Express

that began operations between Kolkata and Dhaka in April, 2008. This train passes through Gede.

“There is tremendous potential for passenger services between the two countries. The Maitree and Maitree-2 Expresses are truly international trains. The Samjhauta Express doesn’t actually cross the Indo-Pak border. Passengers get off at Attari and board the train on the other side whereas the Maitrees are trans-border trains. We plan to build another platform 1.5km beyond Petrapole, close to the Integrated Check Post (ICP). This is where trucks to and from Bangladesh are checked. Once that platform is completed, the immigration and customs departments at the ICP can go through the documentation of the train passengers as well,” an ER official said.

The Sealdah-Bongaon stretch of ER is already electrified. There are plans to electrify the link up to Petrapole (which is 6km from Bongaon) and the proposed ICP stations. Once this happens, EMU locals would run nearly up to the Indo-Bangladesh border.

The coaches of the Maitree Express between Kolkata and Dhaka are being replaced by German-origin LHB ones and the train that chugged into Petrapole on Saturday was an original Maitree Express rake. Commercial services are likely to start in July.