Taxis waiting for passengers outside Howrah railway station

2014-08-12 32

Howrah Station is the largest and second busiest station in India. It is one of the four intercity railway stations serving Kolkata, the others are Sealdah Station, Shalimar Station and Kolkata railway station in Kolkata. Howrah is situated on the West bank of the Hooghly River, linked to Kolkata by the magnificent Howrah Bridge which is an icon of Kolkata. It is the oldest station and the largest railway complex in India.There are currently 23 platforms in Howrah Station (1-15 for Eastern Railway; 16 - 23 for South Eastern Railway) actually local trains of Eastern railway arrives mainly at 1-9 platforms but sometimes in busy traffic local trains of Eastern Railway may arrive from platform 10 to 12. Local trains of South Eastern Railway are mainly arrives at platform 12 to 23.platform 17 to 23 are situated in New Complex.

Trains from this station serve the Kolkata urban area via the Kolkata suburban railway, the state of West Bengal, and most major cities of India. Its twenty-three platforms handle over six hundred trains each day, serving more than a million passengers. It is served by two zones of the Indian Railways: Eastern Railway and South Eastern Railway. The station is operated by the Eastern Railway.South Eastern Railway was previously known as the Bengal-Nagpur Railway (BNR, derisively called "Be Never Regular" because of its notorious tardiness) which built the truck route from Kolkata to Nagpur connecting to Great Indian Peninsular (GIP) route to Mumbai and the trunk route to Vijayawada Junction connecting with the GIP route to Chennai. Eastern Railway was previously known as East Indian Railway (EIR) which built the trunk route from Kolkata to Delhi and beyond.

Four of India's most important trunk rail routes end in Howrah. They are Howrah-Delhi, Howrah-Mumbai, Howrah-Chennai and Howrah-Guwahati. Today there are 23 platforms in Howrah Junction /Central. The first Rajdhani Express in the country ran between Howrah and New Delhi in 1969. Eastern Railway handles trains for northern, north-western, north-eastern & eastern India through Barddhaman line & Katwa line. South Eastern Railway handles trains for southern, south-western, south-eastern, western, and central India through the Medinipur Line. The Kanthi line is also serving long distance intrastate trains.

The Eastern Railway and South Eastern Railway section are connected by two links, one is Lilua-Tikiaparha link, and other is Rajchandrapur/Dankuni-Bankrha link, currently used by only goods trains. There are proposals to introduce passenger train service on these two links to facilitate quick travel between the two sections avoiding Howrah.

Source: Wikipedia

This footage is part of the professionally-shot broadcast stock footage archive of Wilderness Films India Ltd., the largest collection of HD imagery from South Asia. The Wilderness Films India collection comprises of tens of thousands of hours of high quality broadcast imagery, mostly shot on HDCAM 1080i High Definition, HDV and XDCAM. Write to us for licensing this footage on a broadcast format, for use in your production! We are happy to be commissioned to film for you or else provide you with broadcast crewing and production solutions across South Asia. We pride ourselves in bringing the best of India and South Asia to the world... Reach us at wfi @ vsnl.com and admin@wildfilmsindia.com.