CMRL Looking to Utilize Alandur Ramps for Koyambedu-Airport Services
Here’s another mildly interesting piece of news from this week.
The Chennai Metro Rail Limited is actively looking to run metro services between Koyambedu station on line 2 and the Airport station on line 1! If implemented, this would be the first time metro services are operated across different metro lines in the country.
Running this type of a service is feasible thanks to the ramps of a rake interchange facility located south of the Alandur interchange station. In Phase 1 of the Chennai Metro, the CMRL built only 1 maintenance Depot at Koyambedu to serve both lines & plans to utilize two roughly 350 meter long ramps to transfer train-sets between them which I had very recently written about. See: Rake Interchange Links at 3 Indian Metro Systems for more details including information on the ones present in Hyderabad & Bangalore.
Location of Koyambedu, Alandur & Airport – view Chennai Metro map & information
Chennai Metro’s rake interchange ramps at Alandur – See: Chennai Metro Map
Satellite view:
Ground level view:
As per a CMRL official who interviewed with The Hindu, there are several variables that need to be considered and analyzed before any decision is made. Their first priority is to start regular services on the 8 km Airport-Alandur-Little Mount section of line 1. After that, it will conduct a feasibility study by conducting surveys and running reports of passenger data to see if running cross-line services is worth the effort.
For more updates on Chennai’s metro, check out the Chennai section of The Metro Rail Guy!
– TMRG
Aa a corollary, could services be run from Alandur to the Little Mount line?
From Koyambedu to Little Mount? That won’t be possible as the trains will have to come down/up the ramp and then reverse.