Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus

Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus stands on the site of Bori Bunder, the yard from which India's first passenger train departed for Thane on 16 April 1853. Designed by the British architect Frederick William Stevens and completed in 1888 as Victoria Terminus to mark the golden jubilee of Queen Victoria, it took ten years to build and cost around 1.6 million rupees, an immense sum at the time. The building is an exuberant collision of Victorian Italianate Gothic Revival with the traditions of Indian palace architecture: a ribbed central dome crowned by a figure of Progress, turrets, pointed arches, stained glass, and a riot of carved stone in which local craftsmen from the Sir J. J. School of Art worked peacocks, monkeys, elephants and gargoyles into the ornament. The booking hall's vaulted ceiling and blue stone columns rank among the finest Victorian interiors in Asia. UNESCO inscribed the terminus in 2004 as an outstanding example of the meeting of two cultures, noting that British architects working in India produced a style found nowhere else. The station was renamed for the Maratha ruler Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj in 1996 and given its fuller present name in 2017, and it remains the busiest railway station in the country, handling around three million commuters a day alongside long-distance services. It was also the site of one of the deadliest episodes of the November 2008 attacks, commemorated by a memorial on the concourse. A heritage gallery inside the administrative wing displays original drawings, instruments and rolling stock artefacts.