Bhilai Steel Plant Lit Its First Blast Furnace in February 1959 and Now Rolls 130-Metre Rails in One Piece, Welded Into 260-Metre Panels for Indian Railways

Bhilai Steel Plant in Chhattisgarh has been rolling rails for Indian Railways since 1960. Since 2016 its Universal Rail Mill has turned out rails 130 metres long in one piece, which the plant welds into 260-metre panels. The Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL), the state-owned steelmaker that runs Bhilai, and the Ministry of Steel both call them the longest single-piece rails in the world. In June 2017 the plant loaded 27 rakes of 260-metre rails in a single month, which plant officials told Business Standard was its best month for rail loading since it opened.

The plant began as a 1950s agreement with the Soviet Union to build a works making one million tonnes of steel ingots a year. It is now the biggest producer of rails in the SAIL group, and as of 6 November 2026 SAIL has approved a plan to raise its capacity again.

A 1955 agreement and a plain with no factories

SAIL’s own page says Bhilai was established in 1955 with help from the former USSR and commissioned in 1959. It says the plant was meant to anchor India’s push for industrial self-reliance. Sources differ on the day the agreement was signed, giving either February or March 1955, so this article uses only the year.

Russia Beyond, reporting from the plant in 2014, notes that Bhilai was one of four steel plants the Indian government chose for the late 1950s. Bhilai and Bokaro were built with Soviet help, Rourkela with German help and Durgapur with British help. All four now sit inside SAIL.

TIME, writing in February 1959, reported that the Soviet side had lent India $130 million to be repaid over twelve years at 2.5 percent interest. It counted 854 Soviet technicians at Bhilai, who had brought their families, and said 370 Indians had been trained in Russian mills. Every senior Russian was paired with an Indian counterpart. Russia Beyond adds that German and British personnel left the other two plants within two or three years of start-up, while Soviet engineers stayed at Bhilai for decades.

This is the same national idea that Jamsetji Tata dreamed of decades earlier: that India should make its own steel. At Bhilai the state took it up at much larger scale.

February 1959: the first blast furnace

A blast furnace is the tall shaft where iron ore, coke and limestone are heated until they yield molten iron. TIME’s issue of 9 February 1959 said the first blast furnaces of two new Indian steel mills, Rourkela and Bhilai, had been formally commissioned that week. It noted that Bhilai was a month behind schedule.

SAIL’s 2009 golden jubilee account, carried by the Association for Iron & Steel Technology, says President Rajendra Prasad commissioned Rourkela’s first furnace and opened Bhilai’s the following day. The date most often given for Bhilai is 4 February 1959. This article could not check that day against a primary record, so the safe statement is early February 1959.

1960: the first rails

MyGov, the government’s citizen-engagement site, carries a 2026 piece by SAIL’s executive director for commercial matters. It says SAIL’s rail production began in 1960 at Bhilai, when the first rails came off the Rail and Structural Mill. Business Standard calls Bhilai the only SAIL plant that makes rails. By 2016 it was sending Indian Railways about 800,000 tonnes a year, according to Business Standard.

Railways grew around those rails. MyGov puts Indian Railways at 1,284 million originating passengers in 1950 to 1951 and more than 8,000 million in 2024 to 2025. It describes a network of over 70,000 route kilometres and more than 7,000 stations. MyGov also says the rails SAIL has supplied so far could circle the Earth more than 16 times.

The Universal Rail Mill: 130 metres in one piece

The mill that changed the product is the Universal Rail Mill (URM), built at Bhilai for around Rs 1,200 crore, according to Business Standard. Hot trials and commercial production began in November 2016. Business Standard reported that the first 130-metre rail was rolled on a Tuesday at the end of that month. Commercial shipments followed in January 2017, once the government consultancy RITES finished its third-party inspection, SteelOrbis reported.

Steel Minister Birender Singh opened the mill on 23 January 2017. That day SAIL dispatched its first consignment of 260-metre rail, about 1,000 tonnes, Business Standard reported. The URM added 1.2 million tonnes a year to the older mill’s 0.8 million, taking Bhilai’s rail capacity to about 2 million tonnes.

A long rail matters because every joint is a weak spot. The plant says the 130-metre rails are welded into 260-metre panels, which cuts the number of joints and steadies the track. Before the new mill, the plant made the same 260-metre panels by welding 65-metre rails from its older mill. The URM needs only one weld.

The record came in June 2017. Business Standard reported that Bhilai loaded 27 rakes, a rake being a full train set of wagons, of 260-metre rails from the two mills in that month, and 65 rakes in the April to June quarter. April’s load had been 17 rakes and May’s 21.

What the rails are made to do

MyGov describes R260 grade rails built for the mixed passenger and freight traffic Indian Railways runs. It reports purity limits on hydrogen, oxygen and phosphorus that SAIL says match or beat European specifications. It also lists ultrasonic testing, third-party inspection from furnace to dispatch, and a corrosion-resistant nickel-copper-chromium (NCC) grade for coastal lines. Business Standard noted that NCC rails were first rolled in 2010 to 2011 for the South Central Railway.

The plant today

The Prime Minister dedicated the modernised and expanded plant on 14 June 2018. The Ministry of Steel’s summary for that month says more than Rs 18,000 crore was spent, lifting hot metal capacity to 7.5 million tonnes a year from 4.7 million, the highest in SAIL. It adds that SAIL’s total capacity rose to 21 million tonnes from 13 million.

In July 2026 Parliament was told that SAIL has approved raising Bhilai from 6.8 to 10.2 million tonnes a year at about Rs 31,000 crore, according to PTI and SteelOrbis. One report calls the nod “in-principle”, the other “formal”, so the stage of approval is not settled. The same MyGov piece says SAIL plans a separate rail facility costing almost one billion US dollars, to make over 1 million tonnes of rails a year.

Where the wording differs

A few details are worth reading carefully:

• 130 or 260 metres. Business Standard, SAIL’s own page and the Ministry of Steel put the single-piece rail at 130 metres, welded into 260-metre panels. MyGov’s 2026 piece says the mill makes “260-metre rails”. This article follows the first three.
• “Longest in the world.” The claim comes from SAIL and the Ministry of Steel. No independent ranking turned up in the sources opened.
• Sole supplier. SAIL’s page still calls Bhilai the exclusive rail supplier. But in 2018 Indian Railways opened a global tender for long rails because it expected SAIL could not cover its needs, the first time in three decades that rail purchasing had been opened to private firms, PTI reported. Jindal Steel and Power won about 20 percent of the Rs 2,500 crore order, and finished its first delivery in April 2019, Business Today reported. Bhilai remained the main source.

For more on the network these rails serve, see how Indian Railways electrified in a decade.