Fourteen gold caparisons: how the railway reached Chalakkudy

The railway line that runs through Chalakkudy was paid for, in part, by selling the gold off a temple’s elephants. That is not a story anybody in the town tells as folklore, which is a pity, because unlike most things told as folklore it is in the treasury records.

Forty years of letters

The Kingdom of Cochin wanted a railway from Shoranur Junction down to its harbour for a very long time before it got one. Archive records show that Rama Varma XV — the Maharaja of Cochin from 1895 to 1914, remembered by the title Rajarshi — carried on a prolonged and detailed correspondence with the Resident of the British Empire from 1862 onward about the ways and means of establishing the line. Four decades of that correspondence produced a single unhelpful answer: the state could have its railway, but the state would have to bear the entire expenditure involved in laying the lines.

This was not a rich kingdom. Cochin in the 1890s was a small princely state whose revenues came largely from land and from forest, and the capital cost of a hundred kilometres of railway was well beyond what the treasury could find. What happened next is the part worth remembering.

What the Maharaja sold

The treasury records of the Kingdom of Cochin substantiate that the Maharaja sold fourteen gold elephant caparisons belonging to the Sree Poornathrayesa temple, along with personal ornaments belonging to the Cochin royal family, in order to fund the project. A caparison — the nettipattam that covers an elephant’s forehead at a temple festival — is not an ornament in the small sense. These are large, heavy, ceremonial objects, and fourteen of them constitutes a serious act of liquidation by a ruler who evidently thought a railway mattered more than a procession.

With the money sanctioned, the project immediately ran into a different obstacle. About 18 miles, roughly 29 km, of the proposed alignment between Angamaly and Edappally lay not in Cochin at all but inside the neighbouring state of Travancore. In October 1899 Travancore was formally requested to hand over the land required for laying the line. It did. Construction began that same year, undertaken by the Madras Railway company on behalf of the Cochin state, under the diwanship of P. Rajagopalachari, who held the office from 1896 to 1901.

Two openings, six weeks apart

Commissioning was delayed because bridges had to be built across several rivers on the route, and one of them was the Chalakudy. The line was then opened twice. Goods traffic began on 2 June 1902; passenger traffic followed on 16 July 1902. Six weeks between the two is not an accident or an administrative curiosity — it is a straightforward statement of what the line was built for. The commercial case was freight, and passengers were the second call on the capacity.

Malayalam sources on the town agree on the year and add the local detail: rail traffic came to Chalakkudy in 1902, and the railway bridge here, on which work had begun in the 1890s, was completed at that moment. From then on, they note, traffic from the south quickened noticeably. The original line was metre gauge and about 62 miles or 100 km long, and it terminated at the Ernakulam Terminus behind what is now the Kerala High Court, where a circular track had been laid so the engine could be turned around.

The bridge the road borrowed

The most under-told consequence of that 1902 opening is what it did to road travel here. In the early decades, according to Malayalam sources on the town, other vehicles crossed the Chalakudy river on the railway bridge itself, and that arrangement continued until 1970. The main road through the town — today’s Market Road — only came into existence around 1915 to 1920, and vehicles using it went south by way of the railway overbridge.

So for sixty-eight years the only reliable fixed crossing of the river at this town was the Railway’s, and everything else borrowed it. That ended when the separate Chalakudy road bridge was finished in 1970 and ordinary surface traffic finally moved off the rails. It is worth holding onto when you look at the modest single-storey station on Mala Road: for most of the twentieth century this institution was not merely a place to catch a train, it was the town’s bridge.

Metre gauge to broad gauge

The next major change was the gauge. The metre-gauge line was converted to 5 ft 6 in broad gauge as part of the development of Cochin Port, and the sources give the completion of that work as 24 October 1935, while also describing the programme as running from 1930 to 1935, under the diwanship of C. G. Herbert. The same programme carried the line onto Willingdon Island and required the Venduruthy bridge to be built. Ownership had changed along the way too: the line was the property of the Cochin government but was worked by the South Indian Railway Company after the Madras Guaranteed Railway contract expired on 31 December 1907.

What the line became

After independence the route was allocated to the Palakkad railway division, formed on 31 August 1956, and transferred on 2 October 1979 to the newly created Thiruvananthapuram division, which is where Chalakudi station sits administratively today. Doubling of the Shoranur–Ernakulam stretch was completed in 1986 and electrification in 1996. English-language sources describe the corridor as carrying an average of around 110 trains a day, a mix of passenger and goods working, which is why a station on it gets more service than its town’s size would otherwise justify.

And then there is the ending nobody plans for. Cochin Harbour Terminus, the station the whole section is named after, has been out of regular use since services from Ernakulam Junction stopped in 2013. It is locked. It sees the occasional tourist working — the Golden Chariot called there in 2022 — and nothing else. The corridor is still called the Shoranur–Cochin Harbour section, and the trains through Chalakkudy still run on a line named for a terminus that no longer takes them. Fourteen gold caparisons bought a railway to a harbour; the railway outlasted the harbour station by a comfortable margin.