Hyderabad: The foundation stone for the Cherlapalli satellite terminus of the South Central Railway on the eastern side of the city was finally laid on Tuesday. Once the station is developed and trains terminated there, it is expected to decongest the existing rail terminuses in the city.
Union railway minister Piyush Goyal laid the foundation stones of various infrastructure and passenger facilities to be built in the South Central Railway zone at Secunderabad railway station on Tuesday.
The three major rail terminuses in the twin cities — Secunderabad, Kacheguda and Hyderabad — are saturated due to huge inflow and outflow of traffic. To ease the congestion, Lingampally station on the west side of the city was developed at a cost of around Rs 30 crore.
The Railway Board had sanctioned the project to develop the Cherlapalli station in 2016 -17 at an estimated cost of Rs 221 crore. This terminus will be connected to the Outer Ring Road and is convenient to access both public and private transport.
There is also a proposal to operate private train services directly from this terminus. Tenders worth Rs 117.25 crore have been finalised and work will commence shortly, according to railway officials.
It was stated that 427 stations in the South Central Railway Zone will be equipped with Wi-Fi facility which will cost Rs 6.5 crore.
Railway officials say the task of extending free high-speed Wi-Fi to the zone was taken up on a war footing. This includes 170 stations in Telangana state and 293 in Andhra Pradesh. Some 36 of these stations were already equipped with Wi-Fi.
Secunderabad was the first station on the South Central Railway to provide free high-speed Wi-Fi in December 2016. On an average, about 19.5 lakh users log in every month at these railway stations. Secunderabad station sees the fourth highest use of Wi-Fi among all stations in the country.
The Wi-Fi facility of SCR is provided by RailTel Corporation of India Ltd in collaboration with Google Universal Services Obligation Fund (USOF) and the Tata Trust.
On Tuesday, the foundation stone was also laid for the electrification of the Yerraguntla-Nandyal section and the double line with electrification of the Guntakal-Kalluru section.
