UP Transport: Expressways, Railways and Airports

Uttar Pradesh sits across the middle of the Ganga plain, so almost every road and rail route between Delhi and the east, and between the Himalayan states and central India, has to cross it. The state therefore carries one of the largest road and rail networks in the country, and in the last two decades it has added a set of access controlled expressways that examiners ask about by name, route and length. The questions are straightforward once the routes are fixed: which two places an expressway joins, which district it ends in, and which body built it.

The expressways

Most of them are built and run by the Uttar Pradesh Expressways Industrial Development Authority, UPEIDA, set up in 2007, while the Yamuna Expressway belongs to the Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority and a few routes are national highway projects.

The Agra Lucknow Expressway was the first long UPEIDA road and opened in 2016. The Purvanchal Expressway, opened in 2021, has an airstrip near Kudebhar in Sultanpur district where transport aircraft and fighters can land in an emergency, a feature examiners like. The Bundelkhand Expressway, opened in 2022, ends on the Agra Lucknow Expressway and carries the Jhansi node of the defence industrial corridor along its line. The Ganga Expressway, when finished, will be the longest expressway of the state.

The railways

The first train in the state ran between Allahabad and Kanpur in 1859. Today two zonal headquarters lie inside Uttar Pradesh: the North Eastern Railway at Gorakhpur, with the Lucknow, Varanasi and Izzatnagar divisions, and the North Central Railway at Prayagraj, with the Prayagraj, Agra and Jhansi divisions; the Northern Railway runs its Lucknow and Moradabad divisions here as well. Gorakhpur Junction is known for one of the longest railway platforms in the world, about 1,366 metres, a record it held until a longer platform was built at Hubballi in Karnataka. The state holds three of the great railway establishments: the Research Designs and Standards Organisation, the research and standards wing of the Indian Railways, at Lucknow; the Modern Coach Factory at Rae Bareli; and the Banaras Locomotive Works at Varanasi, which was the Diesel Locomotive Works before it was renamed in 2020. The first Vande Bharat Express of the country ran between New Delhi and Varanasi in February 2019. The Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor crosses the state, its first section opened between New Bhaupur near Kanpur and New Khurja, and its operation control centre is at Prayagraj.

Metro and rapid rail

Lucknow was the first city of Uttar Pradesh to get a metro, with commercial services from September 2017, and Kanpur and Agra followed; the Aqua Line of the Noida Metro serves Noida and Greater Noida, and the Delhi Metro reaches Noida and Ghaziabad. The Delhi Meerut regional rapid transit corridor, whose trains are called Namo Bharat, is the first regional rapid rail system of India, and its first stretch between Sahibabad and Duhai in Ghaziabad district opened in 2023.

Airports

Uttar Pradesh has four international airports in operation: the Chaudhary Charan Singh International Airport at Lucknow, the Lal Bahadur Shastri International Airport at Babatpur near Varanasi, the Kushinagar International Airport, opened in 2021 for Buddhist pilgrim traffic, and the Maharishi Valmiki International Airport at Ayodhya Dham, inaugurated at the end of December 2023. The Noida International Airport is being built at Jewar in Gautam Buddha Nagar district, with a Swiss airport operator as the concessionaire, and is planned as one of the largest airports of the country. Scheduled flights also use Prayagraj, Kanpur, Gorakhpur, Agra, Bareilly, Hindon in Ghaziabad, Chitrakoot and Shravasti, so the state has more airfields in civil use than almost any other.

Waterways and road transport

National Waterway One, the Ganga route from Haldia to Varanasi, about 1,620 km long, ends in the state, and the multi modal freight terminal at Ramnagar in Varanasi was built to handle its container traffic. Road passenger transport is run by the Uttar Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation, formed in 1972 out of the older government roadways, and the state has one of the longest national highway networks in India, with the Lucknow Agra, Prayagraj Varanasi and Delhi Kanpur corridors carrying the heaviest traffic.