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Mumbai
Station Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus is a beautifull
Station
Building
formerly Victoria Terminus of Bombay. It is one of the 26 World Heritage
Properties in
India
.
Built as the headquarters of the Great
Indian Peninsula Railway and opened in 1887, on the occasion of Queen
Victoria
’s Golden Jubilee, it was, surprisingly, not built by a great and renowned
architect of Victorian England but by a local man- F.W. Stevens.
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In the midst of the ceaseless bustle
ever- present in
Central Bombay
, one just has to stop and admire and absorb the delights of this fantastic monument-
the out pourings of a northern imagination in a tropical clime.
The turrets, the battlements, the
gargoyles, the delicate peacocks sculptured beneath the eaves, the intricate brickwork,
the domes, the arches, all add up to what has been described as the jewel of Bombay-
Saracenic-Gothic at its exuberant best.
Let us now move away from the baroque
splendours of Victorian architecture to another especially charming aspect of rail
travel in
India-
the little hill trains that haul passengers up from the steaming plains to the cool and
refreshing mountain air of the
Himalayas
and the Nilgiris. Four fascinatingly different little mountain railways were built
during the heyday of the Raj so that people could escape from the intense summer heat of
the Indian plains.
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