BENGALURU: There is something romantic about long train journeys. I spent the first two decades of my life crisscrossing the country by rail; I often joke that I was born in a train! My father, who spent 30 years in Indian Railways, considered the railway station his second home. My earliest memory is of travelling from Kharagpur to Kottayam with an overnight stay in Madras Central (now Chennai) — it took 52 hours to reach my grandparents’ house. Clothes stained by coal from the steam engine; taking a bath at the Madras railway station guest house; buying food from the platform hawkers; sharing a meal with fellow travellers; exchanging comics and newspapers; reading the railways timetable — they are all etched in my memory.
While the British pioneered rail transport, Indian Railways has become one of the world’s largest rail networks and biggest employers, transporting almost 2.5 crore passengers daily and employing close to 14 lakh people. Not surprisingly, it has spurred books and movies. While there are numerous books about railways, some of the best have been written by British journalists, Christian Wolmar being the most prominent author and railway historian. Fire and Steam tells the dramatic story of the people and events that shaped the world’s first railway network. The opening of the pioneering Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830 marked the beginning of the railways’ vital role in changing the face of Britain.
If your bucket list includes taking the world’s iconic train journeys, Paul Theroux’s 1975 classic The Great Railway Bazaar is a must read. Here Theroux recounts his early adventures on an unusual grand continental tour. Asia’s fabled trains — the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Frontier Mail, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Mandalay Express, and the Trans-Siberian Express — are the stars of a journey that takes him on a loop eastbound from London’s Victoria Station to Tokyo Central, then back from Japan on the Trans-Siberian.
Great Railway Journeys of the World by Max Wade-Matthews contains accounts of nearly 100 of the world’s most legendary train journeys. The book has over 700 pictures of the locomotives, stations, and tracks that link beautiful scenery with bustling metropolises. The Pictorial Encyclopedia of Railways by Hamilton Ellis, with over 800 pictures and captions running into 30,000 words, tells the story from the first Babylonian rutways to the 100 mph monorail.
The Penguin Book of Indian Railway Stories by Ruskin Bond remains one of my favourites. A Short History of the Indian Railways by Rajendra B Aklekar has many fun facts and stories from the time our first wagon rolled out. For instance, the locomotive engine for the maiden run between Bombay and Thane was pulled by 200 coolies on the streets! And the maximum speed of India’s first experimental train was 7.2 kmph. The more recent Indian Railways co-authored by Bibek Debroy is an interesting take on the importance of railways in the creation of a national identity.
Platform Souls by Nicholas Whittaker is a classic on the joys of being a trainspotter. Trainspotting was invented in 1942 by a railway publicity officer Ian Allen, by publishing lists of locomotives that could then be ‘ticked’ off when sighted. That started a hobby among many children, who went to great lengths to spot an engine.With traffic jams and global warming on the rise, we may see a resurgence of the romance of the railways. It would be a rejection of the (as Whittaker describes it) “emotional poverty” of car culture in favour of the “joyful communism of the trains”. (The author is a technologist based in Silicon Valley who isgently mad about books.)