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Themed food trail, river museum and art gallery to come up at Curzon bridge in Prayagraj before Mahakumbh 2025
The historical two-storey rail-road Phaphamau Curzon Bridge built over the Ganga will be made a grand tourist attraction before the Mahakumbh 2025
The historical two-storey rail-road Phaphamau Curzon Bridge built over the Ganga will be made a grand tourist attraction before the Mahakumbh 2025.
Officials said a themed food trail would be developed on the rail route of the bridge. It will have stalls decorated in special designs offering local delicacies.
The proposal aimed to highlight the spiritual, cultural and historical heritage of Sangam city.
There are plans to set up a unique river museum as well with focus on the mythological churning of the ocean, the importance and greatness of religious and mythological places located on the banks of the Ganga etc. All this would be shown digitally, they added.
The river museum will also have videos and photographs of sites right from Gangotri, the place of Ganga’s origin to Gangasagar, where the holy river meets the Bay of Bengal, said a senior district administration official aware of the proposal details.
“An art gallery will also be set up in which historical documents and artifacts will be displayed. A sky walk will also be built on the upper part of the bridge for the tourists and pilgrims. An open-air restaurant and a special selfie-point have also been envisaged,” added the official.
“A detailed plan for the initiative has been drawn up. All the related projects in this regard will be started soon,” said divisional commissioner, Prayagraj Sanjay Goyal.
The work of assessing the robustness of the 117-year-old bridge has been completed by a team of experts from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Roorkee after a week’s work. The technical report of the bridge is expected soon, said another official.
The construction of the Lord Curzon Bridge that catered to both rail and vehicular traffic was sanctioned in 1901 as a state railway bridge. The bridge has a single broad gauge (BG) line between the girders and a roadway on top. The engineer-in-charge was Robert Richard Gales. It had opened for railway traffic on June 15, 1905, and for road traffic on December 20, 1905.
Deeming the bridge unsafe for rail and road traffic, the railways decided to close and demolish the bridge in 1998. This rail-cum-road bridge built in the northern part of Sangam city is the third oldest bridge in the city after the oldest Naini Bridge (1865) and the second oldest bridge over the Tons river in the district.
This bridge was officially named Motilal Nehru Setu after independence. But people still know this bridge made of steel commonly only by the name of Lord Curzon Bridge and it is still often referred to by this name.
