On this day 168 years ago, South India's first passenger train service chugged along from Royapuram

CHENNAI: It was on a cloudy day on July 1, 1856, that the new station of Royapuram made history by becoming the venue for the first train service in the Carnatic when a train rolled from there to Wallajah Road.

Not many know that Royapuram is the oldest standing railway station building in the Indian sub-continent. The new station building was inaugurated on June 28, 1856, by the then Governor of Madras, Lord Harris, just three days before the first train service.

It was an old decrepit building in a dilapidated condition with overgrown scrub vegetation till the Southern Railway renovated it and opened it to the public on October 2, 2005. This status of Royapuram is important because it was the first instance in the Indian sub-continent that a station-building was constructed before the commencement of train services.

While Bombay was the venue for the first train service in April 1853, the building in the form of Victoria Terminus was opened by the Great Indian Peninsula Railway only in 1888. And on the eastern coast, Howrah got a station-building in its present form only in 1905. When the first train service from Howrah to Hughli was run on August 15, 1854, the station-building consisted only of a temporary tin shed.

The Carnatic region probably has the first association with the Railways in India. One would find it surprising that the earliest initiative for a survey for a rail line was undertaken in South India between Madras and Bangalore in 1828, barely three years after the first rail line was opened between Stockton to Darlington in 1825 but nothing seems to have come out of it.

Rail construction

Curiously enough, the pioneer of railway construction in India was a military engineer who became an opponent of any great extension of railways in India.

Around 1838, Captain (later Colonel) Arthur Cotton, ME, laid a few miles of line from Madras City towards the Red Hills for the transport of road material. Colonel Arthur Cotton was ironically against expansion of the railway system and held that inland water transport should be encouraged. But this attempt can hardly be considered as the true beginning of railways in India, as it was not intended for passenger or goods traffic.

Regarding the attempt to establish a regular rail line in the Madras Presidency, the information available is meagre owing to the loss of the records of the old Madras Railway. It seems that a ‘Madras Railway Company’ was formed in London in July 1845 to build a line from Madras town to a trade centre called Walajanagar, about 70 miles to the south-west.

A committee consisting of the railway expert Simms, Captain Boileau and Lieutenant Western prepared a project report for the line from Madras to Walajanagar in 1846, based on which the official sanction for small ‘experimental lines’ was received. On August 17, 1849, agreements were signed with the East Indian Railway Company for a line from Calcutta to Raniganj (120 miles), with the Great Indian Peninsula Railway Company for a line from Bombay to Kalyan (33 miles), and with the Madras Railway Company for a line from Madras to Arkonam (39 miles).

Madras Railways

Despite the agreement being signed, there was very little progress. The Board of Control (established by the Government to oversee the affairs of the East India Company) didn’t appear very keen on a railway line from Madras as they were not too sure about the financial viability of the line.

They also opined that Madras is not as rich as some of the other Presidencies in valuable products such as jute and cotton. While the experimental lines from Bombay and Howrah got sanctioned, the sanction for the rail line from Madras appeared to have been stalled. But it ultimately came to Madras due to the persistence by the military engineers from the Madras Sappers, led by Colonel (later Major General) Duncan Sim and Major (later Major General and Sir) Thomas Pears.

Things started moving fast only after the appointment of Sir Thomas Pears as consulting engineer to the Madras Railway Company. In a series of memoranda written during 1850, he laid down, not just the route of the possible experimental line, but a general system of Madras railways.

He said that the province should be served by two trunk lines: that one should run from Madras by Salem and Coimbatore, and thence through a gap in the Western Ghats to the small seaport of Beypore near Calicut on the Malabar Coast; and that the other, diverging from the first line at a point some 70 miles from Madras, should be taken westwards to Bangalore, then northwards to Bellary, and so to Raichur, where it would meet the railway from Bombay.

At the end of 1851, he asked for permission to begin to build a line that should be laid first to a small place called Menil, 50 miles from Madras (later extended up to Wallajah Road), and the Government of India sanctioned this project in March 1853.

On receipt of sanction from the Board of Control, work began at Madras on June 9, 1853. In less than 3 years, a 64-mile long 5-foot and 6-inch gauge line was opened for traffic.

The first train with 300-odd passengers chugged into the Wallajah Road railway station (then known as Arcot) from Royapuram, a journey lasting about 3.5 hours, scripting a new chapter in the annals of railway history. Though there is little information about the arrangements at Wallajah Road, it seems to have been welcomed with some amount of fanfare.

GSIR in 1858

The establishment of the first rail line in 1856 opened the Carnatic region to expansion of the railway system in south India.

Within two years of the first railway service in south India, the Great Southern of India Railway (GSIR) Company was formed in 1858 with its headquarters at Negapatnam (Nagapattinam) for “the construction and working of a railway from Negapatnam to Trichinopoly, with branches to Salem and Tuticorin with a total of about 300 miles”.

The construction of the line from Negapatnam via Tiruvarur to Thanjavur (48 miles) started in April 1859 to broad gauge (BG) standards and the line was opened to traffic by December 1861. The line reached Trichinopoly (Tiruchirappalli) in 1862 and this started an unstoppable expansion of railway lines in the Madras Presidency.

(The writer is a financial advisor in ICF, Chennai, and has a keen interest in Railway history)