Egmore Railway Station

Egmore railway station never fails to bring back nostalgic memories of the railway announcements and the weighing machines that told us amusing things. The place is now quite the maze because of its size and the sheer number of trains it operates today. If you don’t know your way around platforms you might get lost in here.

The Egmore railway station is 109 years old. It stands on a historic sitewhere the East India Company converted a standing choultry into a fortified redoubt. It later served as a sanatorium for soldiers and then in the 1800s as a Government Press. The Male and Female Orphan Asylums functioned from here when they moved out of Fort St George in the mid-18th Century.
By the late 19th/early 20th Century, a part of this property was owned by Senjee Pulnee Andy (1831-1909).This was acquired by the South Indian Railway Company as a suitable location for its northern terminus. The Egmore ­station cost Rs. 17 lakh to build and was completed in 1908. The design was by Henry Irwin and E. C. Bird. The contractor was T. Samynada Pillai of Bangalore who also ­constructed the Madura and Trichinopoly stations of the SIR. It was one of the early instances of usage of concrete in Madras. The structure also had another first – incorporation of Dravidian motifs within the Indo-Saracenic genre. The Egmore Railway station remained a pristine architectural structure complete with wooden staircases and mystical interiors until the 1980’s after which it had to give in to the population burst .The name Egmore is now synonymous to the smell of dried fish, the sea of people and a whole lot of chaos.

Source: Madrasmusings | Wikipedia
Photo: wiele & Klien, Madras.

The Madras Electric Tramway

The Madras Electric Tramway Company Limited (1895-1953) was first incorporated in the year 1892 .The construction of the first track commenced in 1894 and the first tramway section opened for use in May 7, 1895. The Company ran the first electric tramways in India . Its activities expanded in 1904. The trams operated over 26km of road, and the rolling stock consisted of 103 single-deck cars, each equipped with two electric motors. The daily mileage was approximately 7,000 with the cars carrying daily 1,25,000 passengers on average. The ticket fare was one anna (1/16th of a rupee) and the trains did not exceed a maximum speed of 7kmph. This made it easy for the passengers to get on and off the train as they pleased anywhere on the route between egmore and broadway via mylapore. Hoards of office-goers used the train to travel to work.
Lucky are those who got to live in Madras when a river flowed in Buckingham canal and trams ran across the place. People who used the train fondly reminisce the sound of the bell which signalled the trains arrival and the driver changing gears with a high pitched noise. As madras became chennai, we had to part with a lot of things and tram services too came to an end in April 1953.
The wage problems with the employees union led to the closure of the service and then chief minister C.Rajagopalachari in July 1953 announced that the Railways had expressed their inability to run the tramway service, and the Government too could not takeover and manage it.
Source: The Hindu