Hyderabad: The Secunderabad railway station’s old heritage building has been razed down to pave way for a new modern or swanky station. Photos of the demolition by the South Central Railway (SCR) are doing rounds on social media, evoking a sense of loss and notalgia for many in the city.
Though the pink-cream structure that was demolished was not the original structure of the Secunderabad Railway Station, it was built around the 1950s and served as one of the main stations in Hyderabad. The demolition is part of the railway’s project to modernize older stations in India.
The Secunderabad railway station in Hyderabad was originally built in the 1870s during the reign of the sixth Nizam Mir Mahboob Ali Khan (1869-1911). The plan to construct was a project that was envisaged under the fifth Nizam Afzal-ud-Daula (1857-69) by the British which urged the then Hyderabad state government to set up the Nizams Guaranteed Railways.
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The Wadi-Secunderabad railway line was the first ever one that built by the British and the Nizams. Eventually the Kachiguda and Nampally stations were also built and became a very important part of the city’s transportation system.
The South Central Railway (SCR) demolished the main terminal building of the Secunderabad Railway Station as part of its Rs 720 crore redevelopment project. It plans to modernise the station into a world-class transit hub, and to also tackle long-standing infrastructure issues in order to better passenger facilities as well.
The Secunderabad railway station is also classified as a Non-Suburban Grade 1 (NSG1) station, and has a daily footfall of 1.5 lakh passengers and about 180 trains. An activist who did not want to be named said that the building should not have been demolished. “The historic building was functional. The railways could have kept it. This kind of development is not good for our heritage,” he decried.
