CHENNAI: The work on laying the last few metres of the elevated Velachery-St Thomas Mount MRTS extension line has picked up pace and Southern Railway has begun developing St Thomas Mount railway station into a multi-modal hub.
A series of amenities are being installed to provide the station a facelift and also to enable it to handle the crowd of passengers expected from metro rail, suburban and MRTS trains. A broad foot over-bridge with three escalators and which can accommodate double the number of people than a regular facility is being readied. The machines have been installed and the roofing work is on.
A double discharge platform is also being prepared to help people board trains easily. The main entrance has been spruced up and tiles have been laid on the floor that was unpaved for years. The pathway to the ticket counter too has been paved. A pathway into the parking lot has been demarcated to prevent two-wheelers and pedestrians from mixing. The space around the metro-MRTS station complex is going to be spruced up and paved.
A good number of people already use the foot overbridges of the railway station to access metro rail. This is an old narrow foot over-bridge across the tracks.
Sources said that most of the work is focused on making multi-modal transit easy for commuters using MRTS, metro rail, suburban train and buses. Every day, more than one lakh commuters use the MRTS line, while around four lakh passengers use the suburban line. The railway station is located between the main road and the MRTS metro rail station complex.
Southern Railway has set 2022 as the deadline for completing the MRTS linking from Adambakkam. The elevated line needs to be built for the last 500 metres over the railway tracks to connect to the station complex.
After land acquisition was over, construction of pillars for the elevated line began. “The idea is to make the station ready by the time the MRTS line is linked. Railways estimate the number of commuters on the MRTS will increase several fold from the current 1.5lakh per day because several people from Tambaram and beyond will be able to switch to MRTS or metro. It is going to be one of the biggest transport hubs in the city and will make commuting easy for lakhs of people,” said N Karthik, who travels for work from the southern suburbs.
