Salt Cotaurs: Dissolving in the exigencies of time

From a hectic schedule, one involving wagons and tonnes of goods, the defunct facility in Periyamet now sits quietly watching a modern bridge slowly come into existence

Salt Cotaurs and the Elephant Gate Bridge | Photo Credit: Photo: Prince Frederick

Visual storytelling has a device that is spot-on while seeking to contrast the past with the present. A steak of the past is allowed into the frame for a fleeting second, the images washed in sepia tones.

As one trudges down the forgotten trails of Salt Cotaurs, reports from The Hindu Archives bring those fleeting sepia tones to the picture.

Around the cusp of Sydenhams Road and DeMellows Road, one gets a glimpse of Salt Cotaurs. However, the Elephant Gate bridge work is likely to engage the eye first, especially now, as it has been reportedly expedited. On the subject of heritage and Madras, the emerging bridge replaces an older one, constructed nearly 90 years ago and was buckling under the pressure of increased traffic flow.

Concerns over the structural stability of the old bridge had partly led to a new bridge being commissioned. The lacklustre facade of Salt Cotaurs overlooks the bridge work, and it takes a sharp eye to decipher the names built into the masonry work to define the facility — ‘Salt Cotaurs’ and right below it, ‘Goods Depot’. They are as faded as the memory of the facility. Salt Cotaurs, originally a storage facility for salt is best remembered as one of the biggest goods sheds to be operated in the country by the railways. In a report in April 1962, The Hindu remarks that 100 wagons would enter the facility on a regular day, and on a busy day, 150.

Salt Cotaurs wagon shed | Photo Credit: Photo: Prince Frederick

Now, footslogging around the abandoned and ramshackle structures at Salt Cotours, one might often hear only the sound of their footsteps. A clutch of three bamboo weavers have parked themselves near what used to be the Lost Property Office maintained by the Southern Railway. It presents a picture that echoes the spirit of Alanis Morrissette’s Ironic. Isn’t ironic the facility that is irretrievably lost in the shifting sands of time is still holding on to its Lost Property Office, though closed?

It is Salt Cotaurs, not Salt Quarters

The memory of things past is invariably not felled in one swell stroke with a massive club hammer, but slowly weakened with the chisel-peen hammer called workaday language.

On Sydenhams road, a bus stop displays that kind of language. A whiff away from Salt Cotaurs, this stop is named “Salt Quarters Bus Stop”. While this bus boarding facility would stay plonked, the misleading speculation its nameboard might promote would travel to many parts of the metro, into homes and people’s minds. On Google, the bus stop has achieved the dignity of a rating, with a lone user giving it a five upon five.

It certainly helps to pay attention to what one puts on signboards — it most certainly does.

Interestingly, further up on Sydenhams Road, a lane leading off it and towards Ripon Building bears a name that is certain to bring a smile to any knowing passerby — “Ribbon Building Link Road”.

The feeble chatter of the bamboo weavers is a contrast to the thumping sounds of the past, contributed by machine and man. Here is a vignette of it, from as early as 1894.

The lost property office

The Hindu (edition June 26, 1894) carries a release from the railways that spells out in unequivocal terms that children of people working at Salt Cotaurs are not to be brought into the premises, as that would disturb the work. This announcement only suggests that Salt Cotaurs was bustling with people. A co-operative canteen also functioned at Salt Cotaurs, as a report in January, 1973, indicates.

Early on in the trail, one would come upon abandoned closed sheds for wagons. It brings into sharp relief an event that took place in April 1962, which The Hindu reported in its pages.

It marked the inauguration of a new goods shed, the biggest of them all at that time at Salt Cotaurs.

S V Ramaswami, then Union Deputy Minister for Railways, is reported by The Hindu as noting that raison d’etre of the new shed is to “ensure better turn-round of wagons and better safety of goods”. He also promised “increasing the covered accommodation in the goods yards”. H D Singh, then General Manager of the Southern Railway, volunteered more information: A plan to establish another goods shed in the neighbourhood.