ISLAMABAD, Feb 17: Frequent gridlocks at the Sihala Railway crossing owing to closure of the ‘Pathak’ after every half an hour is causing nuisance to both the road users and the area people.

The crossing on the Rawalpindi-Kahuta road is one of the busiest arteries in the twin cities. Since the road is actually one lane but made into two tracks to accommodate two-way traffic, it remains clogged most of the time. The road is also in the use of heavy vehicles of Pakistan Atomic Energy Agency Commission and a large number of oil tankers which get filled at an oil depot located in Sihala.

The worst sufferers of the traffic mess are patients and office goers. The traffic congestion becomes nasty during peak hours especially when hundreds of large buses of the PAEC pass through the railway crossing.

Often there is no traffic police official to ease the traffic snarls. The policemen or for that matter some armymen are sent to the spot only to facilitate hassle-free passage to the vehicles of the PAEC; complained some drivers of public service vehicles who cross the Pathak many times a day.

“Civic authorities of Islamabad have totally neglected such a grave issue under their nose. Due to absence of any overhead bridge or underpass at the busy railway crossing, I am forced to waste hours at the Pathak due to its frequent closure,” says Babar Hussain, who runs a Suzuki carry.

M. Nazir, who runs a passenger van from Rawalpindi to AJK, says: “So often we get stuck up at the pathak due to closure of the gate. And when the gate opens it takes quite a time before the congested traffic gets cleared.”“As a driver you are lucky and spared a lot of trouble when you find the pathak opened. Why is all the attention being given on beatifying and developing Islamabad and nothing is happening as far as the uplift of the rural areas is concerned,” questions Mohmmad Azad, another driver.

Syed Abdul Rehman, prayer leader of a mosque, yards from the crossing, says the government constructed an overhead bridge on a railway crossing on the Rawalpindi-Kalar Syedan road which is not that congested spot, but totally neglected construction of the same at the ever busy Sihala pathak. He says due to absence of any protection wall at the crossing, a fast train rammed into the mosque back in 1998 due to brake failure killing six people.

A shopkeeper in Sihala bazaar says due to the road being too narrow, bumpy and patchy to accommodate such a heavy traffic many fatal accidents have occurred involving head-on collisions, taking many lives. He mentions that a few months back a van carrying female students of a vocational school was trampled by a huge bus, killing some girls. He says there is no repair or maintenance work on the road for years.

A sub-engineer of the Punjab highways’ communication and works department, Saad Mahmood, says former CDA chairman Kamran Lashari had offered to construct either an overhead bridge or an underpass at the Sihala railway crossing and widen the Humak-Hari Syedan section of the Pindi-Kahuta road. He claims that as the Punjab highways department was facing financial constraints, it transferred the project to the CDA, which had also obtained an NOC to this effect.

The Punjab highways department was to widen the Hari Syedan-Kahuta section of the road but due to fund shortage the project could not be executed.

But a senior CDA official told Dawn on condition of anonymity that though the civic authority had plans to widen that section of the road, which fell in its limits, it didn’t have any plan to construct either an overhead bridge or an underpass at the Sihala crossing.

A spokesperson for the railways ministry says that if any authority builds underpass or overhead bridge at the crossing, his ministry would have no hesitation in granting an NOC.