Vadnagar where PM once sold tea declared ‘adarsh railway station’

NEW DELHI: Ahead of assembly elections in Gujarat, the railway has redeveloped the Vadnagar railway station where Prime Minister Narendra Modi once sold tea along with his father in his childhood. This railway station earlier had a meter gauge rail line, which now has been converted into broad gauge rail line on the 55-km long Mehsana-Varetha rail section under the Western Railway.

 Describing this newly-redeveloped face of this railway station as ‘New India, New Railway station’, the Ministry of Railway recently shared both old and the new pictures of this railway station.  “It has become famous now after Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister. The passengers passing through this station come out from their compartment and take selfies calling it a station which has made a tea seller, a Prime Minister,” said Sanjay Kumar, a local resident of Vadnagar city.

In 2021, PM Modi had virtually flagged a pair of MEMU passenger trains running between Gandhinagar and Varetha railway station in Mehsana district. To make this section more commercially viable, the railway has started running both passenger and freight trains regularly. The railway has given a major facelift to this railway station while the Gujarat Tourism department has installed a  big tea- kettle at the railway station  as a reminiscence of India’s PM once having sold tea here.

Sources in railway here said that the Union Ministry of Culture and Gujarat Tourism department had jointly declared development of the Vadnagar-Modhera-Patan heritage circuit and works for developing a heritage park are going on at the station.

As the Archaeology department has found after excavation that a Buddhist monastery, dating back to 2and 4th AD, had existed in areas, the Vadnagar city is also to have a heritage site. Chief spokesperson of  Western Railways Sumit Thakur said that  the Vadnagar railway station has been redeveloped more aesthetically and conveniently than it was earlier. “ It has got state-of –the –art aesthetic station building and architecturally constructed entry and exit gates,” added Thakur.