Travel to Sri Lanka: Kandy: British Infrastructure

The British naturally introduced modern transportation systems.

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The Kandy station platforms, still receiving a dozen trains daily.

The right-of-way has many signs warning pedestrians away, but they are universally disregarded.  The trains do move slowly.

In a metric age, this British milestone survives on the Colombo-Kandy road.

A bridge from the 1820s.

The plaque recalls Governor Edward Barnes, who not only supported the development of coffee plantations but went into the business himself.  He seems to have an inspirational leader, however: see, for example, the adulatory portrait in Fifty Years in Ceylon (1891), the autobiography of  Thomas Skinner, Ceylon's pioneer road builder.

The British bridged the Mahaweli Ganga with a famous and elegant sandalwood-timber arch that was long ago replaced by a newer bridge.  For pedestrians in this densely populated area, they also built many narrow suspension bridges.

Such improvements kept coming throughout the colonial period.

Recently, many have been retired and replaced by vehicular bridges.

Kandyans took to the bus, as well as the train.  The irony of this sign--nearly obscured by leaves--is that buses abound in Sri Lanka today, but there is no such thing as a formal "halting place."  The buses stop on demand, anywhere and without warning.

A bit of a mystery: the Haloluwa Tunnel under Bahirawakanda, the ridge overlooking the city from the northwest.  Why was the tunnel built?  On either side, the ridge is covered with houses; those on the north side are a bit more accessible with the tunnel, but its cost seems disproportionate to that convenience.  The keystone carries the date 1954, which suggests that the tunnel was built in the early years of independence, as though planners expected urban growth.  All this, however, is very misleading: the tunnel was built between 1824 and 1831, when the tunnel formed part of the main road north from Kandy to Kurunegala.  Coffee-laden carts used it on the way from Kandy to the Mahaweli ferry, and for them the tunnel saved a couple of hours of travel time.  The tunnel became superfluous when a bridge was built across the Mahaweli at Katugastata in 1860: good thing, because the central section of the tunnel collapsed about 1870 and wasn't repaired until the 1950s.