Howrah Station (Howrah Junction)

Among the busiest railway stations in the world by footfall: roughly one million people daily through a single structure. Built in stages from 1854; the current terminal block dates from 1901-06, designed by British architect Halsey Ricardo in an Indo-Saracenic style adapting Mughal and Rajput forms to a Victorian railway programme: arched galleries, turreted pavilions, a central clock tower, red brick with white stone dressing.
The main hall is always full with every cross-section of Indian life: families, porters, soldiers, students, pilgrims and those who have simply come because the station is where you go when there’s nowhere else. Howrah has 23 platforms, the most in India; the view from the station’s elevated footbridge across the full spread is one of the most impressive operational railway vistas anywhere (ask at ticket inquiry for access). The red-jacketed licensed porters negotiate posted per-piece rates: agree the rate before accepting help and count your bags.
Since 2024 the station has a second mouth: the Green Line Metro terminus beneath Howrah Maidan, at 33 metres India’s deepest station, passing under the same river it took the 1943 bridge builders four years of caisson-sinking to cross: two engineering answers to the same problem, four hundred metres apart.