Groundwork starts for Hyderabad Airport Metro

The survey work necessary to refine the Hyderabad Airport Metro's (HAML) alignment and station locations has been completed. N V S Reddy, Managing Director of the Hyderabad Airport Metro, a special purpose vehicle tasked with developing and operating the metro line, has made the announcement. The organisation has now begun peg-marking the 31-kilometer Metro that will connect the IT hub in western Hyderabad to the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Shamshabad in Southern Hyderabad. A satellite-based Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS) and an Electronic Total Station with built-in programs for greater precision and precise coordinate capture were used for the survey. In order to speed up the grounding of airport metro work, it is carried out as part of the pre-construction activities in parallel processing mode. After traveling along the Outer Ring Road (ORR) of the city, the airport corridor will connect Mindspace junction, which is located near the Raidurg Metro station, to the city's international airport, which is located at Shamshabad. The project, which is expected to cost Rs 625,00 million, is entirely funded by the state government. On December 9 2022, Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao had laid the project's foundation stone. The airport and the main city should be reached in just 20 minutes by metro. It is anticipated that some of the stations will be Biodiversity Junction, Nanakramguda, Narsingi, the TS Police Academy, Rajendranagar, Shamshabad, the Airport Cargo station, and the terminal. The project, which is also known as the Airport Express Metro Corridor, would basically be elevated, but 2.5 km of the entire length will be underground. The alignment is transferred to the ground during peg marking. This will make preliminary work easier, like marking the locations of Airport Metro pier (pillar) locations on the ground, conducting soil testing to find out how much weight the soil can bear, designing piers, and so on. According to HAML MD, aluminium boards with a retro-reflective sheet for night-time visibility are also being embedded in the central median, in addition to traditional engineering peg marks on the road. The chainage, or distance between a specific point and the airport metro's starting point, will be displayed on these boards. Boards of a slightly larger size are kept at every half a kilometer, while smaller boards are kept at every 100 meters as 0.1 km, 0.2 km, etc. Between Raidurg and Biodiversity Junction, the boards are positioned in the middle of the median; and from Khajaguda Road's IT Towers to Nanakramguda Junction, where there is access to the central median, the MD stated. From Nanakramguda Intersection to TSPA Intersection, they are being fixed on the trail side as the help street on the city side of the external ring street (ORR) is under extension and at this point, there is no focal middle in this stretch. Reddy added, however, that the airport metro pillars will be situated in the central median of the expanded service road that runs along the ORR between Nanakramguda Junction and TSPA Junction.