Metro Rail’s mega plan: Central Square to be 20-floor tower with a mini mall

The block, which would have interconnecting bridges above the first few floors, would be constructed near Ramaswamy Choultry near Park station entrance. “We are designing it in such a way that people who visit Chennai would want to visit Central Square, mainly the 20-floor building. It would have all passenger amenities, which is lacking in Central now,” Singh told DT Next.

The ground level would be for parking and the first couple of floors would been planned to accommodate a mini mall like shopping area. Another floor would be reserved as resting area for drivers. Though CMRL had initially planned to open running rooms, as does railways at Central, in the block, the idea was subsequently shelved. 

All the ambitious talks and plans of CMRL evapourated after the main event of the day, wall breaking function at DMS underground station bombed big time. Scheduled for half past 12noon, the wall breaking, which marks the completion of tunneling from May Day Park to AG-DMS, did not happen and had to be rescheduled after the cutters at the head of the TBM was blunted by the thick concrete diaphragm wall. 

State industries minister MC Sampath, who made an unscheduled and delayed visit to the metro station to make up for the absence of his cabinet colleague MR Vijayabhaskar (transport), was made to wait well past 4 pm owing to the cutter failure, so much so that metro managers took media persons and their workers for lunch after the TBM failed to break the one-meter thick fibre made diaphragm wall. 

“Everywhere the wall will be made with steel reinforcement. For wall break, it will be a reinforced fibre made Diaphragm wall. The TBM had bored 10cms easily. We thought it would cut the remaining 10 cm easily and push the last layer of the wall easily, but the cutter head went flat (blunted). There is no point in dismantling and replacing the cutters now. So were doing it using the blunt cutters slowly,” a senior CMRL officer explained. Eventually, most of the media personnel left the station at quarter past 4 pm after CMRL officials gave up the activity and said that it would resume later.