A little over six-and-half decades after he was born, it would become possible for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to travel to his hometown Vadnagar on broad gauge.
Vadnagar is situated on the Mahesana-Taranga Hill metre gauge branch line of the Western Railway.
An innocuous entry in the pink book of the Indian Railways’ budget document, which provides details of new lines, doubling, electrification, gauge conversion and other works, regarding Western Railway’s Bhildi-Viramgam (157 km) gauge conversion has a new material modification for Mehsana-Taranga Hill (57.4 km) gauge conversion. A total of ₹201.53 crore has been spent on the project which had a sanctioned cost of ₹414.42 crore. This includes funding from extra budgetary resources worth ₹166.32 crore. The outlay for FY-16 was revised to ₹60 crore and an additional outlay of ₹200 crore has been sanctioned under the head of extra budgetary resources including that from institutional financing. The Mahesana-Taranga Hill metre gauge section runs through the towns of Visnagar, Vadnagar, Kadarpur and Varetha before terminating at Taranga Hill.
Served by three pairs of metre gauge diesel multiple units (local trains), in both directions the train takes 105 minutes to cover the distance end-to-end and 55 minutes to reach Vadnagar, which is 33 km from Mahesana.
The conversion has been necessitated due to several gauge conversion projects being executed in Gujarat, particularly in the vicinity of Ahmedabad, that is, Ahmedabad-Udaipur, Dhasa-Jetalsar and Ahmedabad-Botad.