LUCKNOW: Neetu Sapra has bittersweet memories of the 14 years she spent in J&K since 1997.“No quarters, peak insurgency, Kargil War – it was a roller coaster,” she says of life in a CRPF camp in Srinagar with a two-year-old son and a railway officer husband handling a project as fraught with danger as it was technically daunting. “On a shopping trip to Lal Chowk in 1998, we narrowly escaped a bomb blast. The USBRL shaped us as much as we shaped it.”Neetu’s story is intertwined with the Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla Rail Link (USBRL) that PM Narendra Modi is set to inaugurate Friday, marking the physical bridging of what was once considered a geographical implausibility: seamless rail connectivity from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.“Wives of all railway personnel associated with USBRL would have similar stories to tell,” says Neetu, whose husband Suresh Kumar Sapra was then an executive engineer with Northern Railway.Sapra was posted in Udhampur when former PM H D Deve Gowda laid USBRL’s foundation stone in Udhampur in early 1997. Many thought the task of carving a route through the undulating, terrorist-infested terrain was a fanciful idea.By April that year, India had a new PM in I K Gujral, and a second foundation ceremony was soon planned in Srinagar for the Qazigund-Baramulla section.Sapra recalls receiving an official note from his senior colleague Sandeep Gupta – the executive engineer assigned to lead the 13-strong technical team – to proceed to Srinagar for the July 12, 1997, event.With the odds as steep as the Pir Panjal, the team got cracking. “Srinagar was synonymous with militancy. Nobody was prepared,” Gupta, who retired as USBRL’s chief administrative officer in Feb this year, writes in the 2009 TOI coffee table book, ‘Linking Paradise: A Northern Railway Project’.“We had no choice but to dive in. This was bigger than us,” he writes in the book, remembering how his team got by erratic phone and electricity connections and an inadequate number of vehicles.Sapra’s trip to Srinagar from Udhampur to lay the ground for the foundation ceremony prepared him for what lay ahead.“Just 13km beyond Udhampur, we dodged the possibility of death by a few metres as a landslide occurred in front of our eyes. The national highway was blocked for 48 hours.” A week later, Gupta joined them, reaching Srinagar on a rickety van. A team from CRPF’s 69th battalion was then occupying the railway-owned holiday home in Srinagar’s Tulsi Bagh, leaving Gupta’s team to cram into four dingy rooms within the complex.“We had only candles for light and hauled water in buckets from CRPF tankers,” says Sapra, currently principal executive director in the Research Design and Standards Organisation in Lucknow.Living conditions and logistics remained a challenge throughout. The state power department refused to restore electricity to the railway facility, citing unpaid bills throughout a decade of unrest. It took several meetings with the then divisional commissioner of Kashmir, SL Bhat, for power supply to be restored. Mudassara, the PA to DoT’s then general manager, intervened to provide landlines.On Nov 12, 1997, a railway survey team comprising two officers, three junior engineers and six helpers reached Nowgam (later named Srinagar railway station) on a cloudy, uneasy morning. Locals mistook them for a police raid party, causing an already tense situation to almost spiral out of control.“I had butterflies in my stomach due to sheer anxiety and fear,” Gupta recalls in his essay.Every day, a road-opening party would set out ahead of the railway survey team to detect and defuse potential mines. After spending weeks studying topography sheets and working out other details, Gupta and Sapra drove the first two wooden pegs into the ground to mark the project’s first alignment.“It felt like we had planted a dream,” recalls Sapra.As winter took hold, the survey covered Pampore and Kakapora. The first snowfall of 1997 came on Nov 27. Work had to be halted by Dec 15. The team would return next April to resume work.“On our off days, we hunted for vegetarian food in Srinagar. However, the CRPF wasn’t happy about our venturing out of the railways complex,” reminisces Gupta.While surveying Anantnag, the team would run into surrendered militants still carrying AK-47s. “They looked intimidating, but didn’t do us harm; in fact, they seemed encouraging,” says Gupta.By Oct 31, 1998, the Qazigund-Baramulla survey report was ready. The railway team didn’t just beat the odds; they completed the task ahead of schedule.After the Baramulla-Qazigund section, Sapra and his colleagues were asked to survey the proposed Katra-Qazigund stretch. That was in 2001. The then rail minister Nitish Kumar laid the foundation for this portion two years later.“During the survey, we closely observed how difficult life was for people of the Valley. Pregnant women, critically ill patients and elderly people would be brought down from hilly terrain on makeshift palanquins as there were no roads. Mules and horses were the only modes of transport to ferry goods,” recalls Sapra.Just when things seemed to be going well, tragedy struck on June 25, 2004, when IRCON engineer R N Pundhir and his brother were kidnapped and killed by terrorists at Sugan in Shopian. “It was a jolt. Work paused. But buoyed by local sympathy and police support, the railway men restarted with the same zeal,” writes Bhanu Prakash, the then deputy chief engineer of USBRL, in his memoir.The first trial run in Oct 2008, from Budgam to Kakapora, was a milestone in more ways than one. A Hindu priest, a Muslim cleric and a Sikh granthi presided over prayers before the train rolled in at 30kmph. “Locals lined the tracks and children skipped school to see the trial run. Even the cattle seemed puzzled!” recounts Bhanu.By the time the Qazigund-Baramulla section was commissioned in 2009, tracks were ready for trains to run at speeds of up to 100kmph.Built at a cost of around Rs 44,000 crore, including a parallel highway, the 272km rail route has 36 tunnels and 943 bridges, including the world’s highest, the Chenab Bridge.The rail route promises all-weather connectivity, slashing the 800km Delhi-Srinagar journey to under 13 hours.This isn’t just a story of steel tracks, concrete arches and staggering statistics. USBRL is an odyssey of workers and officials fighting the elements, braving the threat of guns, and enduring separation from their families to finally “connect” Kashmir to the rest of India.