Noney Valley, where the world’s tallest railway bridge pier is being…

Concept

A bridge pier is the vertical column that carries a bridge deck down to its foundation, so the height of a pier is fixed by the depth of the gap it must lift the deck across. Record pier heights therefore belong to railways that are forced to span a deep, narrow river gorge in young, steeply dissected fold mountains, not to lines running over open plains.

Application

The structure referred to here is the bridge over the Ijai (Ijei) river gorge on the Jiribam–Imphal broad-gauge project, the line being built to bring the railway to Imphal. Its central pier rises to about 141 m, overtaking the roughly 139 m piers of the Mala Rijeka viaduct in Montenegro, the earlier record holder. The gorge and the bridge lie in Noney district, in the hill belt west of the Imphal valley, which is part of Manipur — so Manipur is the State/UT named in the question.

Cross-check

The three remaining choices are all mountain territories with railway stories of their own, but none of them carries this structure:

• Sikkim: its first rail link, the Sevoke–Rangpo line, is notable for tunnelling — the great majority of its length runs inside tunnels — rather than for pier height.

• Uttarakhand: the Rishikesh–Karnaprayag project also crosses Himalayan gorges, but it too is dominated by long tunnels and its bridge piers are far short of 141 m.

• Ladakh: it has no railway line at present; the Bhanupli–Bilaspur–Leh alignment remains a surveyed proposal.

Result: Noney Valley is in Manipur.