A temporary level crossing has been set up to speed up the Noapara-Dakshineswar Metro project at a site from which encroachments had been removed about a year ago but access remained a challenge because of rail tracks encircling it.

The 350m stretch is like an island amidst parallel tracks of Eastern Railway’s Sealdah Main and Sealdah-Dankuni sections on either side.

This Metro site under Kamarhati Municipality used to have 352 illegal hutments collectively known as Rajiv Nagar Colony. The hutments were removed in 2017 when the state government agreed, after years of stonewalling, to help the railways reclaim its land.

Rail Vikas Nigam Ltd (RVNL), the implementing agency for the Noapara-Dakshineswar Metro line, had barely rejoiced at the encroachments being removed when a new challenge presented itself.

Since the Sealdah Main section is a busy route with long-distance trains passing by through the night, accessibility to the site was a perennial hiccup. The only side from which the site could be reached has two tracks, one for Sealdah-bound trains and another leading to the car shed.

“We had to put sandbags on the tracks to allow heavy vehicles like transit mixers with readymix concrete to reach the construction site,” a railway official said.

Once the vehicles had passed, the sandbags would be removed for trains to cross that stretch. “Rail traffic could be blocked for a maximum of three to four hours at night, which was inadequate given our requirements,” an engineer said.

Now that the pillars have been constructed, heavier vehicles and cranes with a load of 75 to 100 tonnes would be required to move and place the girders. Railway officials said the strategy of putting sandbags on the tracks for these vehicles to cross over wasn’t feasible.

“This is the reason why a temporary level crossing has been built. The level crossing will be there for six months. After construction is complete, the gate will be dismantled. The guard room will be used for railway infrastructure,” a senior railway official said on Monday.

The level crossing became operational last Saturday and the cranes and other heavy vehicles will start arriving in a week.

Till the land deadlock was broken, the Rajiv Nagar Colony site had been the one critical stretch of the Noapara-Dakshineswar Metro that could potentially derail the entire project. Railway officials said they expected to make the route operational in 2019-20. The site is barely a kilometre and a half from Dakshineswar and less than a kilometre from the Noapara Metro station.

RVNL has built a 600-metre stretch of road off Belghoria Expressway to ferry construction materials to the site.