4/52

Week 4 of 52
Tanjong Pagar Railway Station
30 Keppel Road
Singapore

I have read a fair bit about the Tanjong Pagar railway station lately because rail operations will cease as of July 1st.  The station is currently an active rail station and you can take a train from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  Beginning in July you will still be able to take the same train but it will operate out of a station out of the northern end of Singapore.

Tanjong Pagar railway station was built in the 1930s and from what I have read it was modeled after many US railway stations from that period.  Reading up on this I was very excited to step into a piece of history...

The exterior of the building is pretty with big, stone arches and large columns each stating Agriculture, Industry, Commerce, or Transport...

Even the detail on the inside of the arches is pretty cool...

The interior of the building is not nearly as interesting and I must say, a bit disappointing.  It had a lot of potential but it looked like they never quite finished it or somebody decided to take the cheap way out.

There were a few interesting things on the interior...

The old ticket counter still looks the same as the original that I have seen in photos.  If you look at the larger version you'll see it written in Malay on the left and English on the right.  I should have mentioned that the railway station is actually owned and operated by the main railway company in Malaysia called Keretapi Tanah Melay (KTM). 

I did love this old sign...

You can get outside onto part of the platform.  There really isn't anything interesting out there and unfortunately there were no trains while we were there.

I'm glad that I went and saw it but was pretty disappointed as I had expected it to be more than it was.  I guess you never really know what you'll find when out exploring and sometimes will come across some disappointing things when exploring.  My favorite pictures of the day were from our walk after exploring the train station. 

The first was one of the light poles in the parking lot of the railway station...

We then walked walked through Duxton Hill on our way to Chinatown.  We didn't do much exploring through Duxton Hill so it may end up on my 52 weeks project at some point in the future.  The second picture I liked was somewhere on one of the roads in that area...