A 1910 station of minarets and horseshoe arches, built to a British specification requiring a roof that could carry a metre of snow.
Completed in 1910 to a design by Arthur Benison Hubback, this is the most extravagant of Kuala Lumpur’s Moorish-revival buildings: white, with chattris, minarets, horseshoe and keyhole arches, and a long arcaded frontage.
It replaced an earlier station of 1886, and it served as the city’s main railway terminus for eighty-one years, until KL Sentral opened in 2001.
The snow story
The most repeated fact about this building is that its roof was built to British specification to bear a metre of snow, in a city three degrees north of the equator.
It is a very good story and it is almost certainly not true in the form it is usually told. It appears to be a piece of local folklore that has been repeated so often it now turns up in official material. The roof is a substantial steel structure built to a colonial engineering standard, and the snow-load claim has never been traced to a source.
Worth knowing, and worth not repeating as fact.
The building
Hubback did this, Masjid Jamek, the textile museum and much of the Sultan Abdul Samad complex. The style was a British invention for British Malaya, drawing on Mughal India and North Africa rather than on anything local.
Across the road is the equally elaborate Malayan Railway Administration Building of 1917, by the same architect.
The Heritage Station Hotel occupies part of the building, with high ceilings, colonial fittings and a rather melancholy air.
The honest state of it
It is faded. The platforms are half-used, the paint is tired, and parts of the fabric have needed attention for years. Restoration has been announced and postponed more than once.
That is part of the atmosphere and it is also a genuine heritage problem, and Malaysians point it out.
What still runs
KTM Komuter local trains, one stop from KL Sentral. That is essentially it.
All long-distance services, the airport trains, the LRT interchange and everything else moved to KL Sentral in 2001.
So the station is now a place to look at rather than to travel from — which, given that it was built as a statement rather than as a piece of infrastructure, is arguably appropriate.
Practical
Free. You can walk onto the platforms and around the concourse.
It is a few minutes from Masjid Negara and the Islamic Arts Museum, and it sits naturally at the start or end of the Lake Gardens walk.
The pedestrian route from KL Sentral involves a road crossing that is worse than it should be. A Komuter train or a two-minute Grab is easier.
More History
Sultan Abdul Samad and Merdeka Square
The field where the Union Jack came down in 1957, and the striped clock tower that watched it happen.
Masjid Jamek and the Confluence
The muddy confluence the city is named after, with the oldest mosque in Kuala Lumpur standing on the spit between the two rivers.