Old Kuala Lumpur Railway Station

The old Kuala Lumpur railway station looks like a palace dreamed up for a Mughal emperor who happened to run a railway. It was designed by Arthur Benison Hubback, an architect in the colonial Public Works Department who had already given the city its Old City Hall and the Jamek Mosque, and it belongs to the same family of buildings as the Sultan Abdul Samad Building on Merdeka Square: British structures dressed in a style borrowed from Islamic India, with horseshoe and ogee arches and domed chhatri pavilions crowning the corners. The station opened for traffic on 1 August 1910, built for 23,000 Straits dollars, and the whole complex was finished in 1917.

What catches the eye is the roofline. Large chhatris sit at the corners of the building, six in the original design and two more added in the 1980s, with smaller ones repeated along the front, all above a long, arcaded façade that is entirely plastered and painted white or cream rather than left in exposed brick like many of its neighbours. Stand across Jalan Sultan Hishamuddin and the station pairs up with the Railway Administration Building directly opposite, designed in the same idiom, so that the street runs between two white fantasies of arches and domes. Behind the main building, the platforms still shelter under long steel-framed train sheds, originally glazed and left partly open to let steam-engine smoke escape.

For most of the twentieth century this was the city's railway hub, first for the Federated Malay States Railways and then for Malayan Railways. It replaced an earlier timber station roofed with nipah palm near the present Merdeka Square. A railway hotel, the Station Hotel, occupied the upper floors and northern part of the building. Its role faded when long-distance trains moved to the new Kuala Lumpur Sentral, less than a kilometre south, in April 2001; the hotel closed in the 2010s, and in 2007, for the fiftieth anniversary of independence, the main hall and a platform were given over to a display of old railway equipment.

Today the station is a quieter place, served by KTM Komuter commuter trains and some ETS services, but its setting is rich. The National Mosque and the Dayabumi Complex stand nearby, and it is a short walk across the Klang River to the Pasar Seni area. The colonial core around Merdeka Square, where Hubback's other buildings stand, is close by.

Getting there

The station is on Jalan Sultan Hishamuddin in central Kuala Lumpur, about 400 metres from the Pasar Seni LRT and MRT station across the Klang River, and it is a stop on the KTM Komuter lines. Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport (SZB) at Subang is about 16 km away.