Nobody's Station

PUNE: The Pune Railway Station is a never-ending planning conundrum. In catering to about 180 trains and 9 lakh footfalls everyday, the station has far outrun its capacity. Just about no measure is able to rid the area of its smothering congestion. The station itself draws attention mostly when Pune is hosting an event of some stature. Then too, it gets nothing more than cosmetic faceliftsgrey paint on its stone fa?ade, a space-frame canopy, or shiny but slippery floor finishes all exercises in tokenism, just like the station's underutilised security apparatus.
The Pune railway station was once rated among the most important on the erstwhile Great Indian Peninsular railway line.That importance hasn't diminished today. Yet, the station is most unbecoming of a metropolis like Pune. People take pride in labelling this one of India's dirtiest railway stations, but happily ignore their own irresponsible behaviour that makes it so.
The station dates back to the 1800s: There are records of freedom fighter Vasudev Balwant Phadke being given a rousing reception here in 1879including a bouquet from a British woman when he was being taken by the British to the jail of Aden for his life sentence. There are stories of Mahatma Gandhi awaiting his trains on these platforms; of Lokmanya Tilak receiving the news of Lala Lajpat Rai's deportation here with his famous statement, "Lalaji deported and Minto still alive," and of Jawaharlal Nehru, on the way to jail during the Quit India movement in 1942, leaping onto the platform here to remonstrate against the British assault on unarmed civilians.
The station's original masonry buildings comprised the station master's office, two waiting rooms, a telegraph office with fourteen signallers, a booking office and a large third-class waiting room, all complementing three railway platforms. The present-day structure came up in 1925. Electrification was initiated three years later. Three of today's six platforms earlier catered to the Goa-bound metre-gauge route. The busy foreground also hosts a dargah of Hazrat Kamaluddin Shah Kadri.
The two-storey, linear structure in dressed and rusticated stone masonry has an accentuated central entrance area and enlarged terminals, all capped by a pitched Mangalore tile roof carried over wooden trusses and punctuated with clerestorey openings. The building comprises a series of voluminous halls, flanked by the platform extension on the north, covered with a latter-day reinforced cement concrete slab.
The fa?ade comprises a string of massive square stone piers defining rectilinear punctures on both floors. Slender piers bifurcating the upper punctures, stone balustrade and corner treatment relieve the visual monotony. The entrance is through a porte-cochere with a tiled roof. On the sides of the entrance lobby are two stately staircases placed symmetrically and comprising metal-edged steps and elegant wooden handrail running over wooden tracery.
So many changes have been made to the building over the years that it is hard to tell the original from the new.