The pilgrims' terminus
Puri is one of the four sacred Char Dham sites of Hinduism and home of the Jagannath Temple, and Puri station (code PURI) is where most pilgrims arrive. The railway ends here, a few minutes from the temple and the Bay of Bengal beach. The terminus belongs to East Coast Railway's Khurda Road division.
Since 1897
The Khurda Road–Puri section opened to traffic on 1 February 1897, built as part of the Bengal Nagpur Railway's east-coast network, which was nationalised in 1944. The line runs south from Khurda Road on the Howrah–Chennai main line, through Bhubaneswar's hinterland, to the coast.
A station in temple style
In 2012 the station was renovated into a more traditional Hindu temple-style structure, with added facilities, so that pilgrims step off the train into a building that echoes the architecture of Odisha's temples.
Eight platforms for festival crowds
Puri has 8 platforms, unusually many for a terminus in a town of its size. The reason is the Rath Yatra, the chariot festival of Lord Jagannath, when hundreds of thousands of devotees converge on Puri and Indian Railways runs large numbers of special trains along with crowd-control arrangements at the station. East Coast Railway ran 315 Rath Yatra special trains to Puri in 2024 and planned 365 for 2025, from towns across Odisha and from Visakhapatnam, Jagdalpur and Kolkata's Santragachhi.
Trains from Puri
- Purushottam Express (12801/12802) to New Delhi
- Neelachal Express (12875/12876)
- Howrah–Puri Shatabdi Express (12277/12278)
- Howrah–Puri Vande Bharat Express (22895/22896)
- Puri–Rourkela Vande Bharat Express (20835/20836)
Compare timings in our train timetable.
From the station
- The Jagannath Temple and the Grand Road, the route of the chariots, are a short ride away.
- Konark's Sun Temple is about an hour up the coast by road.