This doesn't mean that there will be sharp curves on the alignment. The map you see is only a bird's eye view of the alignment and is too zoomed out to show the actual small turns.

Look at the Hubli-Londa route in the same image. It is shown as a smooth line, whereas in reality the route is full of sharp turns. So, don't take this as an exact alignment of the tracks.
...
more...

Turns themselves are not the problem for high speed runs. There are many high speed routes with large turns and trunk routes like MAS-HWH, MAS-NDLS etc have a few places where the tracks curve around almost by 90 degress. But these are very wide curves and are properly canted so that trains can run on them at MPS. At a first glance, it appears that something similar will be done in this case too.

And most importantly, a small deviation of 5km to cover more places would always be preferred as railways need to optimize coverage and speed.

There are no Dudhsagar falls between Lonavala and Karjat. The Braganza route's challenges are different compared to those of the Bhor ghat route.

What these people are afraid of, is actually a fear shared by many outsiders too.

At...
more...

the part where the railway tracks cross the falls, there is a severe space constraint. The track crosses the first level of the waterfall very close to a sudden drop. It will be extremely difficult to construct another bridge there without constructing some kind of earthwork to strengthen the area and provide a stable foundation for the bridge. This will most likely end up altering the waterfall area significantly, probably even eliminate the 2nd drop of the waterfall completely by providing some other safe channel for the water to flow.

As most rail fans would know, the Dudhsagar falls and the railway bridge crossing them, are well known to tourists and the location is quite famous. Any altering the falls can potentially ruin the beauty of this place and detract tourists.

A connection between Badampahar and Bangriposi was explored many times by the RB and SER. All those surveys were eventually scrapped as they deemed that constructing through the Bangriposi ghat was a prohibitively costly affair and didn't have sufficient return on investment.

The line was frequently bough up by local politicians in many parliamentary debates (right from the 1950's), but the construction costs due to the ghat section always negated any possible advantage due to the shorter route.
...
more...

Also, even in the 90's and early 2000's, the route had very little passenger traffic potential. This combined with the high cost of constructing and maintaining the ghat section stopped IR from taking up work on this route. It will possibly be the same in the near future too.

I was simply alluding to the part where you were talking about RB and SER not paying attention to the idea. They did, and they have been doing it for a long time and they've had their reasons for not going ahead with it.

IR is always on the look out to increase revenues and make their operations easier. Options that would give these advantages are never cut down simply due to neglect or bias. There are always a variety of reasons behind the approval or lack of approval for a project....
more...

Please don't conclude that they are just neglecting something for no good reason.

With all the advantages you've pointed out, surely it is something that SER and RB would've taken seriously as there are good prospects for increasing the revenue. And the fact that it still didn't receive an approval probably means that they felt that the projected returns weren't sufficient or that the difficulty of constructing in the ghat section wasn't worth the returns.

The block is a 'corridor block' - which means no trains (passenger or freight) will run in that period. All routes have a corridor block everyday for monitoring and maintenance.

With increase in traffic, most major routes are not getting sufficient time for maintenance. A few years, there was a flurry of accidents in SR, as track maintenance was not done properly due to lack of sufficient corridor block period.
...
more...

That said, they could have rationalized the halts and altered schedules to get sufficient maintenance time instead of cancelling trains.