100 years young, still chugging on

Chennai, Jun 11 (UNI) One of the famous landmarks of this buregoning metropolis, Egmore railway station, the gateway to the South, turned 100 today.

It was on this day way back in 1908 that this building with Mughal architecture, constructed by the erstwhile South Indian Railway Company, came into being, operating metre gauge trains.

Since its inception as a wayside station on the Tambaram-Chennai Beach section, the station grew as a famous landmark in the city, that provided gateway to the southern districts like Madurai, Tirunelveli and Tuticorin, besides a few trains to Kerala cities like Thiruvananthapuram.

With the gradual increase in services and introduction of more trains, it became a major metre gauge terminal after the formation of Southern Railways in 1951.

It once served as a tranship point for the north-bound passengers from South to proceed to the Central Station to board trains to northern and western destinations like New Delhi and Mumbai.

This hoary facility also once provided a link service to Colombo from here. The Colombo-bound passengers used to travel by the Chennai Egmore-Dhanushkodi Boat Mail. From Dhanushkodi, the passengers were taken by a ferry to Thalaimannar in Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon. From Talaimannar, they would take a train to Colombo.

But it was consigned to history due to mother nature's fury that struck the Dhanushkodi coast in the form of a cyclone in 1964, which completely destroyed the railway line in Dhanushkodi.

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