Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus

Where it sits. Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus — Victoria Terminus until 1996, officially Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus since 2017, and VT, CST or CSMT depending on the age of whoever is telling you the way — stands at the head of Dadabhai Naoroji Road in the Fort district of south Mumbai. It is simultaneously a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the headquarters of the Central Railway, and one of the busiest stations in India, with eighteen platforms: seven for suburban electric services and eleven for long-distance trains. Several million passengers pass through it on an ordinary weekday, which is the essential fact about the building. It has never been a monument. It is a machine that has run continuously since 1888.

The story behind it. It replaced Bori Bunder, a wooden single-track station in a warehouse district where the first passenger train in India began its run in 1853 and where, during the American Civil War cotton boom, bales piled up in the open until a series of sixteen deliberate fires broke out on a single morning in March 1864. Work on the new terminus began in 1878 to designs by Frederick William Stevens, a British engineer-architect in the Bombay office of the Public Works Department, who won the commission on the strength of a watercolour by the draughtsman Axel Haig and was paid ₹1,614,000 for his services. Construction took ten years — longer than any other building of the period in Bombay — and finished in 1887, the year of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. The station opened to the public on 20 May 1888.

What to look at. The style is usually labelled Indo-Gothic or Venetian Gothic: the comparison to George Gilbert Scott's St Pancras is standard, though the composition is closer to Scott's competition entry for the Berlin parliament, exhibited in London in 1875, with its cluster of towers and central ribbed dome. The main office block is C-shaped and symmetrical east to west, anchored by four monumental corner turrets that frame the octagonal dome — a structure built on dovetailed ribs without centring, a genuine engineering novelty at the time. The figure on top holding a torch and a spoked wheel is an allegory of Progress, and is regularly mistaken for Queen Victoria, whose actual marble statue stood in a canopy below the clock until the 1950s and then vanished; no record of its export exists and historians assume it was sold or destroyed. A lion for Britain and a tiger for India flank the main gates. The body of the building is Indian sandstone and limestone with Italian marble for the finer work, and it is covered in carved foliage, grotesques and allegorical figures of Commerce, Agriculture, Engineering and Science, with busts of the Indian donors Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy and Jagannath Shankarseth set into external niches. Most of that carving, the ticket-office grilles and the staircase balustrades were made by students of the Sir J. J. School of Art under John Lockwood Kipling. Inside, the Star Chamber — still the suburban booking hall — is lined with Italian marble, polished Indian blue stone and glazed tiles by Maw & Co of Britain. Since 2022 the façade has been floodlit in changing colours for national holidays and festivals.

On screen. The station's most-seen moment is the "Jai Ho" finale of Slumdog Millionaire (2008), choreographed on the platforms here, which won A. R. Rahman and Gulzar the Academy Award for Best Original Song. CST also carried sequences in Ra.One (2011) and in The Attacks of 26/11 (2013) — the latter reconstructing the events of 26 November 2008, when two gunmen entered the passenger hall at about 21:30, opened fire with assault rifles and grenades, and killed 58 people and injured 104 before leaving towards Cama Hospital. Station CCTV footage was central to identifying and convicting Ajmal Kasab, the only attacker taken alive.

Getting there and timing. CSMT is the southern terminus of the Central and Harbour suburban lines and now has its own station on Metro Line 3. The heritage building is best photographed from the traffic island opposite, on the Dadabhai Naoroji Road side, in the first hour of daylight or after the floodlights come on. Guided heritage tours of the interior run on limited days and need booking through the Central Railway. Avoid the 08:30–10:30 and 18:00–20:00 suburban peaks unless the crush is what you came to see. November to February is the comfortable season; May is brutal, and the monsoon between June and September periodically floods the tracks.