CHENNAI: As the majestic three-storied heritage structure which headquarters the Southern Railway in Chennai turns hundred, the postal department on Thursday released a special postal cover to mark the celebrations.The building, next to the Central Station on EVR Periyar Salai, houses offices of the General Manager and 18 departments of the zonal railway.
The foundation for the present structure was laid on February 8, 1915 by Lord Pentland, the then Governor of Madras, for building headquarters for a company named Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway Company (M & SMR). The M & SMR was formed in 1908, annexing the railway lines of Madras Railway, and sections of South Indian Railway that was brought under SMR for maintenance.
The M & SMR was undertaken by the government of India in 1944, and the South Indian Railway (SIR) and the Mysore State Railway (MSR) were merged with it in 1951, forming the Southern Railway.The headquarters building was designed by an architect named N Grayson attached to M & SMR. Built on the Dravidian style of classic architecture, the foundation of the
Indo - Saracenic type structure consists of a reinforced concrete raft from five to eight feet below the ground level, which is set upon a stratum of pure sand nearly 20 feet deep, revealed the official records of the Railway.It took nearly 7 months and 15 days to lay the foundation structure consisting of 500 tonnes of steel bars embedded on 10,000 tonnes of granite concrete. Built of stock brick with Porbundar stone, the central towers rise to a height of 125 feet 6 inches.
The stones were transported for eight years via sea to Kerala, and then by rail to Madras. HH Wadia and Bros, who were pioneering in quarrying, camped in Madras from 1913 to 1922 along with their team of skilled masons from Porbundar under the leadership of master mason Pitambar Hira.
The corner towers of the building house water tanks with a total capacity of about 35,000 gallons (1.32 lakh litre). After nine long years of intensive labour and an investment of a whopping `30,76,400, the headquarters was built and thrown open on December 11, 1922 by The Lady Willingdon, the wife of the then Governor of Madras.
The headquarters served the longest railway lines spread over the southern States of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andra Pradesh, and Telangana until formation of South Central Railway in 1966 and South Western Railway in 2003. Presently, the Southern Railway has jurisdiction over the railway lines run through Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Puducherry.