Located in Chhatisgarh and Orissa and part of ECoR, Raipur-Titlagarh(200km) & Titlagarh-Sambalpur(180km) are single line sections which are big money spinners for Indian Railways due to large number of freight trains running over them.
With large scale industrialization by way of iron/steel/ aluminium/ power plants etc of Jharsuguda-Sambalpur- Angul area in last 15 years, substantial incremental freight traffic has come up.
Also passenger traffic has gone manifold over the years due to commissioning of Talcher- Sambalpur Newline project which had revolutionised the travel from Orissa to esp. western India/ jharkhand/ North-West...
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India by creating shorter alternative route.
Today in spite of increase in operational speed, express trains (on Raipur-Titlagath-ABP-CTC/BBST/PURI route) are practically taking a couple of hours extra time in reaching destination then they use to take few years earlier and are perennially late. Condition of trains ones which go to Talcher station and return back instead of touching Talcher Rd. is worse.
Being profitable projects, Indian Rlys allocated huge amount of Rs. 60-70 crores (a princely amount then) for doubling on each section in pink book in year 2006 or so when Mr Lalu Prasad was Rly minister. But money was diverted to other projects!. Funds were allocated in some of the subsequent Rly Budgets also, but the money never came and projects never took off. The highly profitable doubling projects never took off for several years and money was constantly flowing into construction of "socially desirable" new lines (loss making ventures). Had the project been given budgeted funds, if not 100%, at least 75% of the both projects would have been commissioned by now.