NEW DELHI — When the first train steamed out of the western Indian city of Bombay in the 19th century, technology-wary Indians called it the devil’s invention, according to a wire service.
But 150 years down the line, millions in the world’s second most populous nation now believe the railways built by India’s British colonial rulers were a godsend.
Despite the rapid growth of airline and car travel, most of India’s more than one billion people still depend on the over 63,000-km network to get from one part of the huge South Asian country to another.
“It’s one of the cheapest ways to travel,” railway spokesman Akshay Kumar said. “Though we’ve moved from steam engines to the modern era there’s a certain romance to rail travel.”
To revive some of the romance, state-run monopoly Indian Railways kicked off its 150th year festivities on Tuesday with a recreation of its first steam run, a 35-km trip from Bombay to suburban Thane that used to take two-and-a-half hours.
Much of the charm of the world’s second-largest rail network is still in evidence in the 14,000 trains that ferry more than 13 million passengers a day, even though carriages are coated with grime and the platforms are often filthy.
Travellers are greeted on platforms by coolies or porters dressed in red turbans and tunics and many of the network’s almost 7,000 stations, such as the gothic Victoria Terminus in Bombay, are architectural gems.
Packed platforms throb with passengers, porters, ticket touts, tea vendors darting around with kettles of steaming “chai” or tea, samosas frying in giant black woks, book stalls and piles of huge hessian sacks and other passenger luggage.
While steam trains have been mostly phased out, some old lines such as the more than 100-year-old Darjeeling Himalayan Railway and Fairy Queen are still chugging away today.
The Darjeeling steam engine — built in 1881 and known as the “toy train” — wheezes its way through the misty Himalayan foothills to the tea-growing hill station of Darjeeling. The Fairy Queen was revived in 1997 for a weekly two-day trip to a tiger sanctuary and a fort town in the desert state of Rajasthan.
UNIFIED COUNTRY
Initially built to transport raw materials to ports and British imports to every corner of the subcontinent, the railway network unified the vast country and played a key role in in shaping the consciousness of generations of Indians.
Independence leader Mahatma Gandhi criss-crossed the country by train to take India’s freedom movement to the masses.
The railways also played a role in the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 when Britain left and its colony split into Islamic Pakistan and mostly-Hindu India.
Thousands fled their homes atop the roofs of packed carriages and many trains arrived at stations dripping with the blood of the victims of Hindu-Muslim violence.
The railway network is also the economic backbone of the country, transporting about 40 percent of India’s goods traffic including petroleum, coal, grain and steel.
“What makes it special is the trains’ size, the number of people and the sense of bulk and tonnes of steel moving at high speed,” said former BBC journalist and train buff Sir Mark Tully.
But more than 50 years after independence, the romance of riding the Iron Horse has been eclipsed by a harsher reality: the network has some 300 accidents a year.
Experts say a surge in traffic and slow pace of modernisation have made the railways vulnerable to accidents. But authorities defend the safety record, saying the accident rate fell to 0.57 per million km travelled in 1996/97 from 5.5 in the early 1960s.
Though it has computerised its services, introduced many modern trains and fitted state-of-the-art engines on some trains, experts say the state-run monolith should be corporatised to introduce business discipline. Many of Indian Railways’ ageing tracks need to be replaced and thousands of wagons, coaches and engines are crying out for renewal every year.
“For 150 years the railway has served the nation well. But it needs to modernise and increase speed. To do this it needs large investments in signalling, new lines,” said Rakesh Mohan, economic adviser to the finance minister.
Revenues totalled 335 billion rupees in the 2001/02 (April-March) year but after
paying wages to 1.5 million staff — the biggest payroll in the world — and maintaining its mammoth network, Indian Railways is left with precious little to upgrade or modernise its network.
“For all their troubles, unlike other countries, Indian railways have got bigger and better. Criticism is unjustified because it is difficult to run a railway in a country where discipline is not exactly the flavour of the month,” said Tully.