Another shipment of metro rail carriages arrives at Mongla port

Another shipment of Dhaka metro rail has arrived at Mongla port.

The vessel SPM Bangkok, carrying eight carriages and four engines, anchored at jetty No 9 of the port at 10:30am on Saturday.

Harbour Master Sheikh Farid Uddin said the unloading process began right away and will be finished by the evening.

SPM Bangkok had left Japan’s Kobe port with the carriages, engines and various other equipment.

Md Wahiduzzaman, manager of Ancient Steamship Ltd, which is the local shipping agent of SPM Bangkok, said another shipment is scheduled to arrive in November.

A total of 102 bogies and locomotives will arrive in Bangladesh by 2022, he added.

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Earlier, four vessels carrying 34 bogies had arrived at Mongla port.

A test run of Bangladesh’s first-ever metro train service was carried out on August 29.

Each train has six cars that can carry a maximum of 2,308 people at a time. They were manufactured by Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd in Japan, according to project officials.

Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) Line-6, the country's first metro rail system, is being built at a cost of Tk 21,985 crore.

Once complete, the metro rail — with 16 stations — will be able to carry 60,000 people an hour, reducing travel time from Uttara to Motijheel to around 40 minutes, from about two hours by common transports on regular days.