How Do You Build a Bridge Over 240 Trains a Day? Inside Pune's Sadhu Vaswani Puzzle

Here's a question worth sitting with for a second: how do you lower a 54-metre steel span onto a railway line that carries roughly 240 trains a day, without ever telling the railways to stop running?

That's the actual problem sitting at the St Mira's College end of Koregaon Park, where the Sadhu Vaswani bridge — the overpass meant to reconnect Koregaon Park, Yerawada and Cantonment to Nagar Road — has been under rebuild since the old structure was pulled down. The bridge needs to cross the Pune railway corridor at a point where trains run through almost continuously. You can't pour concrete and cure a span over live tracks the way you would over a road. You can't shut the line for the weeks a cast-in-place structure would need. So the engineering answer here is what's called an Open Web Girder — essentially a long steel truss, 54 metres of it, assembled beside the tracks rather than on them, then "launched": slid or pushed into its final position during the short windows when the railways can actually spare the tracks. Every one of those windows has to be negotiated with Central Railway, cleared with the traffic police, and timed around a schedule that doesn't bend for construction.

That single span has been the project's genuine bottleneck. Site reports through August and September 2026 described a sequence of unglamorous but necessary steps before the girder could even move: an old overhead truss had to be fully removed first, work handed to a newly appointed contractor; an existing one-metre-diameter water pipeline running through the site had to be relocated underground before anything above it could proceed. Pune Municipal Commissioner Naval Kishore Ram pushed the civic machinery to fast-track the remaining work and ordered monthly site inspections, setting December 2026 as the deadline for finishing the girder installation itself — with the actual road opening to traffic pushed to January 2027, since laying road surface, approach ramps and the remaining spans still follows the big railway crossing.

As of the first week of October, that's still where things stand: officials describe the open-web girder work as in its "final stage," running toward the December 2026 target, with the Sadhu Vaswani bridge grouped alongside Pune's Ghorpadi and Karvenagar-Sun City bridges as projects aiming for a January 2027 opening. No fresh slippage has surfaced beyond that — which, for a project that's already run years behind its original 2023 work order, counts as a mildly good sign.

None of that changes what it's like to actually get from Yerawada to Cantonment or Nagar Road right now. The detours around a torn-up junction eat into exactly the kind of short, everyday trip — college run, office commute, errand across town — that adds up in fuel and time when you're doing it solo, five days a week, around a construction zone that isn't going anywhere for a few more months.

It's also exactly the kind of route where splitting a ride makes sense before it makes headlines. If you're commuting daily between Koregaon Park/Yerawada and the Cantonment/Nagar Road side while this stretch stays disrupted, carpooling with someone running the same detour means you're not each burning separate fuel and separate patience on the same diversion — you just split the cost of one trip instead of paying for two. The same goes for anything you need moved across that divide in the meantime; sharing a ride that's already heading that way beats sending a dedicated trip through a bridge that's still mid-build. GoVia exists for precisely this kind of local, recurring crossing — not to profit off a commute, just to make sharing the cost of one easier than everyone absorbing their own.