Tully crosses the Bridge
As soon as I heard about the opening of the Jamuna Bridge, I said to myself, I want to be there. I had been a witness to so much of Bangladesh´s history, happy occasions and sad too, successes and tragedies, that I felt I could not miss this milestone. Milestone it certainly is. A river always thought too treacherous to bridge has been bridged.
The north-west, once the market garden of Calcutta, will be able to send its produce to the great cities of Bangladesh. Those wanting to travel quickly from east to west have an alternative to tedious queues at airports. An important link in the Asian Highway and Railway has been put in place.
What pleases me particularly is that Bangladesh Railways have been preserved from disaster. If they had not convinced the donor agencies who thought railways had no future that they were wrong, Bangladesh Railways would not have been given a berth on the bridge. That would have meant the final surrender to roads.
As it is I travelled on the first train from the Bangabandhu West to Bangabandhu East and on that train I was given a colourful magazine which explained how the railways planned to use the bridge as the spearhead of their campaign to rationalise the gauges in Bangladesh and take broad gauge to Dhaka and Chittagong.
As the train proceeded over the bridge, I asked my friend Prof Sahajahan of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, a member of the expert panel which has been advising the bridge builders, why we were going so slow. He replied we had to go carefully as we were the first fully loaded train to cross the bridge. We crossed safely enough.