Morning light

This road in Kodambakkam is usually a low-traffic zone. But with changes to traffic flow on Arcot Road due to the Chennai Metro's construction, the volume of traffic close to this road has increased considerably. 

Sometimes, a driver who does not entirely believe in the Metro's signs tries his luck in finding a shorter route. One through Dr. Gopala Menon Road (this one, yes.) might have been possible a few years ago, but with a new flyover shutting off one end of the road, it is a bit of a challenge using this road to save time!

Emptied out

Here is one more stretch of a main road that has been taken over by the Chennai Metro as they build for tomorrow. 

This one is a part of the Arcot Road (now NSK Salai), just after you get down the Kodambakkam Bridge onto the Kodambakkam side.

Now the metro folks have to wait until a bunch of kids start using this as a cricket field; only after that will they start their tunnelling in any seriousness, I guess!

Waiting, lonely

A part of TTK Road, between the KB Dasan Road and Seethammal Road, has been blocked off for vehicular traffic, thanks to the Chennai Metro's construction spree. 

Most businesses along that stretch have seen a drop in their clientele. Access, parking, all of it is difficult and will likely get more so as the construction progresses. 

For now, Ronald McDonald is sitting alone, contemplating life in McDonaldland, I guess!

Behind the wall

The Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd (the Sisters of the Good Shepherd) was founded in 1835 by St. Mary Euphrasia, (born Rose Virginie Pelletier) who believed that education should bring out the best in every aspect of humans. In the 33 years between her founding the Congregation and her death, St. Mary managed to also establish 110 convents in 35 countries, which has now expanded to 72 countries.

The Sisters set up their schools in many places. One such was in Madras, almost 100 years ago. Given that the Nungambakkam area was not a crowded space, it is possible that the school continues to operate from the same space it was founded in. For some time, it must have been a co-educational school; in the 1920s, there would not have been enough girls going to school to make it viable. By the 1960s/70s, however, Good Shepherd had become a girls-only school. We used to go past the school's walls on the way to our school, quite a distance away. Those days, the walls seemed to be 100-foot high, but I guess they'd have at best been 20-foot tall. At that height, it was impossible to find out what was going on behind those high walls. On the few occasions when we were allowed permission to enter Good Shepherd, it seemed to be the same as our school. But we were sure there was more hidden.

Not any longer, I guess. Going past the Good Shepherd a couple of months ago (the walls are considerable shorter than they then were), I found I could look right through to the grounds of the school. That relentless Chennai Metro has taken over a portion of the school grounds; the Sterling Road station on the proposed Purple Line (Madhavaram to SIPCOT) is to be built underground here. Thankfully for the children of the Good Shepherd school, their playground has been spared; one of the smaller buildings on the edge has been brought down. The girls can continue to enjoy their playtime - I'm sure the walls will come up again, soon!

Other side

Looking through earlier posts on this blog about the Chennai Metro, it is amazing how quickly time has passed. A dozen years ago that an entrance at this spot would have taken you into the Poultry Research Station (PRS) of the Tamil Nadu Agricultural and Veterinary Sciences University (TANUVAS). The cackling of quails and chickens gave way to the noise of pile drivers, earth moving equipment and then of construction. 

In the six months since the inauguration of the Chennai Metro's headquarters, the offices seem to be rather sparsely occupied. Which is fine; my balcony looks out on to the other side of this building complex, and I am in no hurry to see big groups of office-goers gathering under it. 

All the more so considering that about 15 years ago, this was what I could see from my balcony. No hope of the 'lucky days' I had in those times!

Orange line starts

There's frentic activity going on at the point where Dr. Radhakrishnan Salai meets Kamaraj Salai. Seeing the boards of the Chennai Metro there, the first thought was that the metro line would be running along the beachline. 

But no. There is some part of the (proposed) yellow line that would run close to the beach for a very short stretch. That is near the existing suburban station of Chennai Beach, and it turns west quite soon. And that has no direct connection with  the work going on here. What is happening here is going to be a terminus of the orange line. From this, the Lighthouse terminus, the orange line would run all the way to Poonamallee Bypass. That is quite a distance, cutting through the city in a east-west line.

It will take a few years, but don't forget you saw this place before the metro station came up here!

Plurality

Well, we know that the Chennai Metro currently operates 2 lines: Green and Blue. We also know that they've been at different places around the city for Phase 2 of the Chennai Metro. That should add another three lines, and 128 stations (to the existing 32) by the end of 2026. 

Even then, it seems to be a bit of a mystery why their headquarters building in Nandanam is named "MetroS". With the last letter being of a larger font size, there must be something more to it than merely thumping their chest about there being many lines. 

Any ideas? Will be glad to have this mystery cleared up!

Going down

On the blue line, going towards the airport, the rakes of the Chennai Metro take it a bit easy as they come out from below ground after the Saidapet station. It does not appear to be a steep gradient to climb, but it is a kind of s-curve, so best be safe in leaping out into the light after coming all the way from Washermanpet through the underground tracks. 

The return journey also seems to be counter-intuitive; one would imagine that the rake would be reluctant to go underground, away from the sun. But these rakes do not lose any discernible speed. They seem quite happy to go underground.

Taken from across the road, early in the morning last week. The divider on Mount Road takes up a lot more space than it should!

 

Metro to mofussil

That's a picture of the entrance to the CMBT, taken when passing by on an overhead train track. The "M" in the abbreviation is "Mofussil". A word that I haven't heard used in English very often, but one that gained currency under the British East India Company. A word that I have encountered so often in Madras and Chennai that it could have been Tamizh - and yet, one that unsurprisingly has its origins in Urdu. 

Mofussil originally stood for those areas beyond the administrative ken of the Company, outside the realms of their headquarters in Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. Somewhere along the way, it gathered connotations of a hayseed provinciality, not compatible with the sophistication of the city. And yet, here is this facility, in the middle of the city, calling itself the "Mofussil" Bus Terminus. 

No, it is not as if the city expanded to swallow up a bus terminus that was once outside its boundaries. The simpler explanation is that this is the destination for anyone coming into the city by bus from its mofussil areas. It doesn't mater that the origin of bus could be another metro city - Benagaluru, for example - but that doesn't matter; anything outside the city is mofussil. And so here we are, looking down to the transport to the wide world outside, from a very in-city mode of transport - the metro!

Train service

The Chennai Metro was inaugurated in June 2015; in the first few months, it was treated more as a fun ride rather than a regular mode of commute. Just when things were settling down came the heavy rains of December; the Chennai Metro came into its own, as the quickest way for people to get to the inter-city bus terminus at Koyambedu. Running high above the flood waters, the Metro's trains were indeed a lifeline for the many who went back to their hometowns, and other cities, to get away from the rain waters.

There were problems - the trains are meant to carry a little over 1200 passengers at one go - and there were about four times that many at the stations during the peak rains. The Chennai Metro did its best to dynamically alter the schedules to accommodate as many as they could. Apart from that, the spike in traffic helped the Chennai Metro figure out how their systems could take the stress.

This picture is from way before the waters, at a time when the Metro was new enough for everyone to be posing in front of its train-sets. At least the selfie-taking couple is wise enough to stay on the right side of the yellow line, unlike the hero who is trying to channel some kind of superhero!

Not just a token

Chennai has been a relative late-comer to the Metro rail scene, being the sixth or the seventh (depending on whether you consider Gurgaon as being distinct from the Delhi Metro - it actually is) in the country to operate such a service. Since its inauguration on June 29 this year, the Chennai Metro has seen a lot of traffic; the CMRL authorities are still trying to figure out if it is actually commuter traffic, or folks who are taking a joy ride on the Metro.

We were among the latter a couple of weeks ago. I've been used to picking up the small, 1"X 0.3" dull yellow pasteboard tickets on the city's suburban trains that I was looking for something like those when the clerk at the counter, channeling his inner croupier, pushed these tokens towards me. I had heard about these tokens - once anyone enters a station using a token, the system checks if the same token has come out within a given timeframe. If it does not, something like a missing person alert goes out and the passenger is traced. Helps cut down loitering at the stations. 

But then, I kept these tokens away so carefully that I couldn't find them when we got off the train. Searched all my pockets. Nada. So we head over to the help-desk. Too many people there, we are asked to wait. And then, like always, my wife told me where to look for them. Sure enough, there they were. Well, we did not get to find out what happens to a commuter who loses his tokens. And we are glad we didn't!

Cleared

A few years ago, this space was a reasonably wooded forest, which had some wildlife running around it. Within this nine-acre patch of land in Nandanam, a small herd of chital, a brood of mongooses, a few snakes, a couple of monkeys and a wide variety of birds lived together, mostly in harmony, wondering why some of their fellow creatures were cooped up inside buildings. 

Those buildings - which were difficult to spot from the air because of the tree cover - housed the facilities of the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University's Poultry Research Station (PRS). The PRS was set up in 1941, to supply poultry breeders with 'superior germplasm'. Over the years, the PRS introduced a variety of lines; apart from the ubiquitous chickens, they had the Japanese quails, turkeys, guinea fowls and geese. Over the decades, the variants introduced from the PRS appended 'Nandanam' to their names - hence Nandanam chicken or Nandanam quail. 

In 2011, it was decided that the land being occupied by the PRS could be put to better use for the citizens of Chennai. The PRS was shifted to Madhavaram, where the University has extensive space and the site at Nandanam was handed over to the Chennai Metro for constructing their administrative and maintenance facilities. The first thing the Chennai Metro did was to clear the land of almost all the vegetation; a few trees remain around the periphery, but in the centre, both trees and buildings were razed. This picture is from a year ago, when the clearing was going on in full swing; if one were to see this space for the first time now, it would be difficult to believe that deer and koels once frolicked here!

Self-goal?

Believe it or not, there is actually a law which is supposed to penalize those who 'disfigure' public places with 'advertisements' or 'objectionable advertisements'. The Chennai Metro has been trying to keep its pillars clean by scraping off the posters and cleaning any graffiti that appears on them. 

Wonder if this warning would fall under the purview of the Act it refers to!

Elevated rail

At about half-past-eight on a weekday, you would expect the traffic on Mount Road at Guindy to be much denser. Maybe it was just an off-day, for it seems to be quite light. 

The tracks of the Chennai Metro are seen, at a height from the road. Once it is in operation, it is expected to further reduce the traffic congestion. On the evidence of this picture, there doesn't seem to be much need for it!

Bridge and bridge

The Line 1 of the Chennai Metro is the longer of the initial two lines, but just a little nose. At about 23 km, it is a kilometre longer than its counterpart. It also has more underground stations, ten of them to Line 2's nine. All those 10 underground stations are in the initial stretch of the Line, up to the Saidapet station. Leaving Saidapet, the train begins its ascent, to climb over the Adyar river and go all the way to the airport.

That's the pale stalk - with a gap - you can see to the right of the Maraimalai Adigalar Bridge in the picture. In a way, it will be one more bridge over the Adyar. But it can't rival its neighbour, the one built by Coja Petrus Uscan in 1726!

Road and rail

If the grade separator at Kathipara thought that it was on top of everything else, it has had to think again. The Chennai Metro track goes just that little bit over it, heading away from the Alandur station towards the next one on the line, Ekkattuthangal. 

Can't wait to get on to the Metro. The track testing has been done, trial runs have happened and I guess we are just waiting for the station systems to be set up properly now. Would love to get on to one of the test runs - tickets anyone?

Metro matters

It has taken a little over four years and the Chennai Metro appears to be on track for taking on the first set of passengers early next year. Put together, the two corridors will have a tad over 45km of track, of which 24km would run underground. This is a picture of a section of Corridor 2 (Central to St Thomas Mount), between Arumbakkam and Vadapazhani. A map of the corridors can be seen here. 

How may stations does the Chennai Metro have? That was a question at the Madras Quiz, to which many teams knew the answer (no, we did not). Each of the corridors has 17 stations. Another question was to identify which is the only station common to both corridors - that's the Alandur station, near the airport (which we knew). But the correct answer to the first question was given as 32 - which doesn't add up.

One explanation is that the number would depend on how you count the stations. Going by their names, there are only 32. Apart from Alandur, the other common name is Central Metro; on the map, however, the corridors show distinct stations, so if we were to go by that count, there would really be 33 stations. 

And then, there would be some who might insist on adding up the stations and claiming that there are actually 34!

On target?

It is probably Chennai's most global project. No, I'm not talking about the building in the background, but the work that's going on in front of it. The Chennai Metro currently has workers from six nations working on the project at various locations around the city. Apart from Indians (of course!), there are Nepalese, Chinese, Russians, South Africans and Germans who are involved in various aspects of building the metro lines. If we also consider the rolling stock being manufactured at Alstom's factory at Sao Paulo, Brazil, rails from France, fastenings from the UK (and China), communication systems from Singapore and signalling systems from Japan, that's quite a lot of languages to be talking in.

Then there are the complexities of Indian languages. Tamizh, Hindi, Oriya, Telugu... those are ones I've heard most often. Despite all the potential for communication breakdowns, the project seems to be moving along smoothly and appears to be on track for a December 2013 launch.

For all that, the technicians don't appear to be stressed about the schedules at all. Seeing them nice and relaxed, as they go about messing with the theodolites and stuff, you can't help wonder if they could actually speed it up a bit and give us the metro rail earlier!

Station mural

Considering its positioning, so near Mount Road, the Chintadripet MRTS station should have been buzzing with people. The planners also had such visions in mind when the station was opened in 1995; it has quite a bit of parking space, as well as many options for commercial space within the station building. But, as it has happened with most of the MRTS' stations, the "build it and they will come" approach did not pan out exactly the way it was forecast. The network itself has suffered from poor interconnectivity and has not been well patronised. 

With the Chennai Metro also coming up, it is hoped that the MRTS will also get a boost; Chintadripet is one of the MRTS stations that is quite close to the Metro and it could become an interchange point. If that were to happen, a lot more people can look up at this mural on the station facade with a smile!

Urban renewal

There was a time when Chennai had a green lung along one side of Mount Road. Most of the eastern boundary between the Cenotaph Road and Chamiers Road junctions was taken up by the Poultry Research Station (PRS) of the Tamil Nadu Veterinary and Animal Sciences University (TANUVAS). The PRS campus had a few scattered buildings amidst the greenery on its nine-acre campus. The rest of the space was taken up by raintrees, gulmohurs, neem trees and a thick spread of underbrush all around. 

It was a space where herds of chital roamed. Where rat snakes played a daily game of slithering away from a family of mongoose. Where koels, flycatchers, kingfishers, mynahs, woodpeckers and at least 25 other species of birds built nests for generations. Almost all of them have disappeared over the past couple of years, after the land was turned over to the Chennai Metro Rail for its headquarters. 

Once, poultry breeds like the Nandanam Chicken and the Nandanam Broiler were developed here, for use by breeders all over the state (if not all over the country). Now steel rods are being shaped into frames for spans that will carry the metro rail over many parts of the city. Truly a case of urban renewal!