A preparatory run on the Noapara-Jai Hind stretch of Kolkata Metro’s yellow line was successful on Saturday. This 6.2-km stretch will have four stations: Noapara, Dum Dum Cantonment, Jessore Road and Jai Hind Airport, which will connect the metro network to the international airport.
Expected to be thrown open to the public by the middle of March, this will be Kolkata Metro’s fifth route and phase 1 of the 16-km Noapara-Barasat corridor. The preparatory run was conducted ahead of an inspection scheduled for Monday.
Passengers will be able to avail of metro services after coming out from Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport and can easily go to any corner of the City of Joy, helping them save time and money and making their journey memorable as well as comfortable. The Jai Hind Airport station will thus serve as an entry point to the city.
Structural work of the metro station and its underground yard is over, so is work like granite flooring of the concourse and platforms, fire safety work, and the installation of lifts, escalators and stairs.
The airport metro station will have six escalators, lifts and staircases each. There will be two subways, one connecting the station to busy Jessore Road and the other linking it to the airport. The first subway will have four entry and exit points.
In a first for Kolkata Metro, the second subway will have travelators, a conveyor belt-like system to carry passengers across a horizontal or inclined plane.
Modern firefighting equipment will be installed along with three dedicated fireman’s staircases.
Once the airport is integrated into the metro map, commuters can access it via three metro lines through the Noapara interchange. The blue line (New Garia-Dakshineswar) is connected to the East-West Metro’s green line at the Esplanade interchange, enabling passengers from both southern and northern parts of the city to reach the airport seamlessly.
The metro carries around 7 lakh commuters daily in Kolkata. “This was unthinkable on October 24, 1984, when the metro services began at Kolkata,” said an official.
In March, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated an underwater metro project, the first in the country to traverse beneath a river. This section provides services from Monday to Saturday and has four stations: Howrah Maidan, Howrah, Mahakaran and Esplanade.