The Cantonment Railway Station is today one of the busiest spots in Bengaluru, a major rail hub for travellers in and out of the city. But over 150 years ago, it was a very different place – and in many ways, it was one of the factors that made the city what it is today. The story of the station begins in 1864, shortly after the tenure of Sir Mark Cubbon as chief commissioner in Mysore had ended.
Cubbon had built up the finances of the princely state in the years after the British wars with Tipu Sultan and the upheavals that followed; his successor, Lewin Bentham Bowring, capitalised on this with a host of infrastructure projects in the 1860s. City historian Arun Prasad explains, “The British government needed good transportation links to their headquarters in Madras, which was the centre of trade in south India. For a long time, horse carriages were the primary means of transport via road.
...
by the 1830s, proposals for railways in India were already being debated in the British Parliament and supported by traders and bankers.” Advertisement In this context, the Cantonment station had come into being barely a decade after the first railway line in India, connecting Bombay and Thane in 1853. Prasad added, “Bowring had said in a speech that with the opening of the railway line in 1864, the town became the nucleus of the trade with the whole country, and the population has increased so largely that it now ranks next to Madras among the cities of southern India.
” A view.
