Kolkata: The heritage structure on Kaiser Street, on the other side of the tracks of Sealdah railway station’s platform 1 — the Sealdah DRM building — will be razed to make way for development. Sacrificing the 1928-built edifice is not something Eastern Railway — custodian of the office of Divisional Rail Manager (DRM), Sealdah — is looking forward to. “According to the original plan, the DRM building would have been razed for the recent infrastructure upgrade, in which all 21 platforms have been extended to accommodate 12-car EMU rakes for Sealdah’s 900 suburban services.
The plan was painstakingly revised to keep this beautiful structure standing in all its glory, untouched for now. Eventually, it will go to make way for the massive development plan, which hinges on platform extension to accommodate 15-car rakes ,” said Deepak Nigam, DRM, ER’s Sealdah division administrative head who has been instrumental in the mammoth task of the platform extension project. The plot next to the existing DRM building has been allocated to replace the old one.
Pre-construction work, like excavation and piling for the new building, has started. Sealdah station started operating on Dec 2, 1862 and the DRM office would function out of a temporary two-storey structure on the eastern side of the railway tracks. It was only in 1928 that the existing Sealdah DRM building was constructed.
Since then, Sealdah station has undergone several phases of renovation and expansion to meet .