Daund --A great little Transit Station on the CR

I happened to visit the Daund railway station today. This was after a “new” platform was added. Daund is an important junction on the CR and caters for the main southeastern corridor with connections with the north through Manmad. Daund caters the main Chennai line and also provides gateway to Hyderabad, Bhubaneswar and Vijaywada. Besides the ancient Narrow gauge line to Baramati has been recently revised to BG.

Daund is a very small Railway town with-- all island platform-- passenger station. It initially held a large stable for Steam locomotives. I do not know how many but my last glimpses of the working WG’s were at Daund. The station had a single island platform, which catered for four platforms if you consider the lengths. Today it holds six platforms, but in fact there are only four faces to the eye. Platform No. 2 continues beyond its starter signal as platform 3 whereas platform 4 is in a corner of platform no. 1. Five and six are proper platforms but are again placed as island platforms. In effect you cannot approach any platform without climbing the footbridge.

Daund belongs to the Solapur division. The newly formed Pune division has its jurisdiction extended upto Daund but excludes the Daund station. Funnily the only part of Daund station that comes under the jurisdiction of the Pune division is Platform no. 6, since it caters for the trains for Baramati, which comes under the new Pune division. I do not think such partitions make any difference in the working of Railways or of the station. It simply demarcates the division of the staff.

The station has its own Route Relay Interlocking System that controls the Passenger station as well as the relatively large Goods yard. The marshalling part of the yard has disappeared though, since only the completely formed goods trains leave the station. The old platforms are certainly more impressive since they still hold the elegance of the Raj in terms of building architecture. The canteen has been handed over to a Contractor for the past many years, but it still has the charm of tall doors and foyers. The furniture inside the canteen is old teak wood and is quite impressive. It serves delicious food and is famous for the Omelets. It looks like quite a busy place and probably serves as a base kitchen for many trains. I remember spending hours and hours on these platforms in my childhood, waiting for passenger connections almost always delayed (on the way to Manmad.)

The longest rake that visits the station is that of Karnataka Express and comprises 24 coaches. The double-headed power then passes the starter signal of Platform no. 2 and halts way ahead of it in the middle of Platform 1 at the stipulated point. This place also has a fuelling point, since Daund provides a major fuelling halt for most of the trains on this route. The frequency of trains at this station has increased sharply in the recent times. They say it’s one train every 40 minutes. In any case, it is much busier now than it used to be. I also noticed a new WDG 4 waiting in the yard. It seemed it belonged to no one.

I spent only 30 minutes at the station. But it was indeed a delight to watch this tiny, compact but elegant transit station, which has maintained its charm over the years.