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station at Wadi Bunder to throw the conductor wire into the circuit to commence the public service

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Summary

station at Wadi Bunder to throw the conductor wire into the circuit to commence the public service in India—the story of India’s first railway plans and the running of the first

Text of the circular

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RAJENDRA B. AKLEKAR

A Short History

¢ INDIAN
RAILWAYS

A Short History

o INDIAN
RAILWAYS

RAJENDRA B. AKLEKAR

Published by
Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2019
7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj
New Delhi 110002
Copyright © Rajendra Aklekar 2019
The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by
him which have been verified to the extent possible, and the publishers are not in any way liable for
the same.
Photograph copyright vests with the author unless otherwise mentioned.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the
prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978-93-5333-287-7
First impression 2019
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

Contents
Foreword
Introduction
1.
​
The First Experiments
2.
​
Ancestors of Indian Railways
3.
​
Railways Begin Their Operations
4.
​
The Arrival of the Railways
5.
​
Rail Web Spreads
6.
​
The Indian Mutiny and the Railways
7.
​
Rail Gauge and Ghosts
8.
​
New Century, New Life
9.
​
The Animated Rail Life
10. ​
Crime and Romance
11. ​
Notes from World War II
12. ​
Freedom Struggle and Partition
13. ​
Rail Tales from Independent Indi
a
14. ​
Trains of Progress and Politics
15. ​
Of Metros and High Speed Rail
Conclusion
Acknowledgements

Foreword
When I first started out as a broadcaster, I was told, ‘Always remember you
have to tell a story.’ I have kept that adage in mind. Ever since I was a child,
I have been a devotee of the railways. It has been almost eighty years now
since my earliest encounters with the Indian Railways, travelling to
Darjeeling where I went to school, or to Puri for the winter holidays. So I
have always sought opportunities to tell railway tales in my broadcasts,
films and books.
In the TV film From Karachi to the Khyber
, I have told the story of
workers lowered from cliff tops on platforms having to find their own
footholds so that they could blast a route with explosives through the
mountainous Bolan Pass to take the railway to the Pakistani city of Quetta.
In the same film, there is the story of an engineer who persuaded hostile
Pathan tribesmen to allow him to build the line through the Khyber Pass by
telling them the trains would go so slowly they could easily be looted. In
another film, An Indian Summer of Steam
 , there is a maharaja who
remembered having his own royal train, and a steam engine driver who
burst into tears when his engine broke down
.
I have told tales, too, of my encounters with passengers. There was the
passenger on the Khyber Mail who I found reading my book No Full Stops
in India
. He told me I had no reason to be pleased about this, because he
was reading a pirated copy, and went on to say, ‘Now write No Punctuation
Marks in Pakistan
.’ Another time, while making a radio programme about
the Mumbai–Howrah Mail running on the Raj’s Imperial Mail route via
Allahabad, I asked a passenger whether I could interview her. She replied,
‘By all means, but you should really interview my husband. He is a
comedian who specializes in imitating the different ways passengers snore

on trains.’ That would have been wonderful material for my programme,
but unfortunately, the husband had just got off the train.
There have been my encounters with the railway staff too. A favourite
story, which I have told more than once, concerns my suggesting to a
travelling ticket examiner that it was a bit hard having to pay a superfast
surcharge to crawl up the steep climb from Chandigarh to Kalka. The
outra

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