Chennai Egmore - History

History

History says that the station was actually a fort, called the Egmore Redo, similar to the Leeds Castle, which is a part of Santhome. It is said that the station came up in a place that once used to store ammunition for the British.

The station building was constructed on a 2.5-acre land, for which 1.8 acres was acquired from Dr. Paul Andy who, in his letter to the 'Collector of Madras,' initially refused to sell his property owing to the difficulty with which he had purchased and developed the property. However, the South Indian Railway (SIR) Company, which was then operating train services to the south, persuaded him to sell the land, for which Andy claimed 100,000 as compensation. After acquiring the land, the SIR invited Henry Irwin, CIE (chief engineer), who did much of latter day Indo-Saracenic in Madras, and E. C. Bird, company architect, to design a building to suit the traffic need. After several alterations in the plan, the construction work began in September 1905 and was completed in 1908. It was constructed by contractor T. Samynada Pillai of Bangalore at a cost of 1.7 million. The station was officially opened on 11 June 1908.

There was initially a demand that the station be named after Clive, which was, however, strongly opposed by the public as they wanted to name it Egmore. When the station was opened there was no electricity connection and a generator was used. The station became the major meter-gauge terminal for Chennai after the formation of Southern Railway in 1951. Irwin and Bird worked on the design of the building, which was sympathetically added to in the 1930s and 1980s. In the 1990s it was converted into a major broad gauge terminal, a role in which it became operational in 1998.

Earlier cars used to come inside the platform itself,which was found only in this station. In its report, the SIR commented on the construction of a new building for Egmore:

SIR also claimed during the inauguration of the new building that it had given Madras a building to be proud of, 'whose covered platform area is greater than that of Charing Cross Station in London.'

The station became a major metre-gauge terminal after the formation of the Southern Railway in 1951 and served as the gateway to the southern Tamil Nadu, chiefly due to its acting as a connecting point for passengers from the south to the Chennai Central for boarding north-, west- and east-bound trains. A new suburban station building was opened in November 2004 when the Tambaram-Beach broad gauge section became fully operational. With increasing passenger traffic, the entrance on the Gandhi-Irwin Road eventually became insufficient. In 2004, construction of a second entry to the station on the Poonamalle High Road side began at a cost of 115.3 million. In June 2006, the second entrance was opened.