Services End on Kolkata’s Circular Railway to Facilitate Metro’s Construction

10 years after being inaugurated, the Eastern Railways on September 30th ran its last train service on Kolkata’s Circular Railway Line between Dum Dum Cantonment station and the Netaji Subhash Chandra International Airport to facilitate the construction of the Metro’s 6.87 km Line-4 between Noapara and the airport. A portion of the Circular Railway’s existing infrastructure between Dum Dum Cantonment and Jessore Road will be re-purposed to run the metro’s east-bound service while the west-bound services will run on a new parallel viaduct which is currently under construction.

Eastern Railways’ notice – Photo Copyright: Adri Roy Chowdhury

Kolkata’s Noapara – Airport metro line – view Kolkata Metro map & information

The metro line will run underground for roughly 1.75 km between the Jessore Road and the Airport stations. Construction for it was launched by India’s Railways Minister in February 2016 and is being carried out by Senbo Engineering.

The Eastern Railways’ did a poor job at marketing the Circular Railway line’s service to the airport and for many years had been running no more than 10 services to it per day making it not reliable for airport-bound passengers. Here are some images of its viaduct between Jessore Road and the Biman Bandar ‘Airport’ stations:

Circular Railway’s viaduct – Photo Copyright: Jeromedv

Where it ends at the airport – Photo Copyright: Jeromedv

Single line platform at Biman Bandar ‘Airport’ station – Photo Copyright: IndiaRailInfo

An elusive CR train – Photo Copyright: Addy

TMRG reader Adri Roy Chowdhury was able to travel on the Circular Railway’s last train out of the NSCBI Airport station and filmed the following 2 videos. Recently built piers for the metro’s new viaduct can be seen in the second video.

For more updates, check out the Kolkata section of The Metro Rail Guy!

– TMRG