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I never realized what a book or records actually
meant or what an enormous amount of hard work (comprising research,
running around, phone calls, poring over volumes, often amounting to
picking out needles from haystacks!) actually went into the writing
of even a bare two liner, before I joined the editorial team of Limca
Book of Records. Learning about records is the best and most
interesting way of learning about anything, be it communications,
arts, architecture transport or the natural world. Putting them
together, you get the entire history of its development.
I knew very little about the Indian Railways or how
it developed when if first joined. It was already there in the book,
just needing to be updated. Reading through the various records, I
got a very fair idea of how it all came about. Here are some of them.
Indian railways employs 15.84 lakh people the
largest number by a single organization. Northern railway, which
operates on a total of 10,077 routes, is the biggest of the nine
zonal divisions. With more than 7 lakh passengers per day, the
central railway has the highest passenger kilometers in the
country-for both suburb and non-suburban service. The North-East
Frontier railway zone with its headquarters at Maligaon, Guwahati,
the smallest of the nine zonal railways in the country, serves 10
states comprising what are commonly known as the seven sisters, i.e.
Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and
Tripura and the states of Sikkim, Bihar and West Bengal. Daily Indian
railways cover a distance equal to three and a half times the
distance to the moon!
The first rail construction company in the country
was formed by R.M.Stephenson in 1844. it was called the East Indian
Railways Company (EIR). The contract was singed on August 17, 1849.
EIR and the Great Indian Peninsula Railway Company (GIP), England,
were authorized to construct and operate rail lines at Calcutta and
Mumbai (then Bombay). The first regular track in Asia was the broad
gauge. The 65 lb wrought iron double-headed rails were imported from
England by GIP in 1 853 and a 34 km track was laid between
Boribunder and Thane. The 84 km track between Delhi and Rewari and
the 12.3 km Farunkhnagar Salt Branch for the Rajputana Malwa Railway
were opened for traffic on Feb 14, 1873. a marrow gauge line (2 ft 6
in gauge), the first in the country, was built by Gaekwad’s
Baroda State Railways in 1862. the first narrow gauge line of 2 ft to
run a B-class 0-40 steam locomotive of 14 tonnes was the Darjelling
Himalayan Railway, the first hill railway built in 1881.
The Kalka-Shimla line was built during 1899-1903.
from a height of 65 m at Kalka where it connects with the BG line
from New Delhi the track climbs by gradients of 1 in 33 to a height
of 2,075m at Shimla, covering a distance of 95 km. The Darjeeling
Himalayan Railway climbs 64 km from Sukhna at a gradient of one in 25
to a height of 2,557 m at Ghoom, from where it drops to 2,067 m at
Darjeeling. The 87 km long track has 5 spiral loops and 3 reversing
zigzags to gain height. One of these, the Batasia Loop, has the
sharpest curve with a radius of only 18 m. it takes 7 hours to cover
the 87 km journey from New Jalpaiguri to Darjeeling. This railway
records 33 million passenger journeys and 5 million tones of freight
every year.
The Ewing monorail, which had a single rail and was
fitted with two double-flanged wheels, was first used by C.W.Bowls
for the Patiala state Government. To stabilize it, a –5ft
outrigger wheel was fitted on one side with an inner wheel of 3 fit
diameter and 6 inch width. While 95 percent of the weight was to be
on this wheel, 5 percent was on the outrigger. In March 1909
Orenstein and Koppel of Berlin built four 0-3-0 steam locomotives for
this monorail. Two stretches were installed, between patiala and
Sirhind and one from Patiala to Sunam. One locomotive and one coach
(Col. Bowles private saloon) was restored and is now on display at
the Transport Museum at New Delhi.
The Victoria terminus (now Chattrapati Shivaji
Terminus) building constructed over a ten-year period from 1878-88,
an architectural masterpiece designed in the Gothic-Saracenic style
by F.W.Stevens, is one of the most magnificent railway station in the
world. The headquarters of central railways, it stands at
Boridbunder from where the first train was flagged off, going from
Mumbai to Thane, a distance of 34 km, on April 16, 1853 at 3.30 p.m.
three locomotives named Sultan, Sindh and Sahib hauled 14 railway
carriages with 400 distinguished guests on board. The trip was
completed in 75 minutes after a short halt beyond Sion for water. on
April 18, 1853 two regular passenger trains were introduced between
Mumbai and Thane. The GIP Railway introduced First Class restaurant
cars on its mail trains on July 23, 1904 wit a standard British menu.
Jodhpur Railway adopted J.Stone’s patented design of electric
lighting in 1897 when train lighting was rare even in England.
The Deccan Queen, the first vestibule train in the
country was introduced between Victoria Terminus (Mumbai) and Pune on
June 1, 1930. the first fully air-conditioned Rajdhani Express was
introduced between Mumbai and Delhi, covering a route of 1,384 km in
16 hr and 15 min. the first superfast train was the Delhi-Howrah
Rajdhani Express, introduced on March 1, 1969. Shatabdi Express,
currently the fastest train, touches the 140 kmph mark at certain
points on the 705-km-long New Delhi-Bhopal route. It covers 194 km
from New Delhi to Agra Cantt in 90 minutes and reaches Bhopal in 7 hr
40 minutes, covering the longest distance with the least number of
stops.
In recent times, two of the most significant
achievements on the part of Indian Railways has been the launch of
the first metro or underground network in the country and the
construction of the Konkan Railways. The metro was inaugurated on
Oct. 24, 1984 at Calcutta. The route length was 16.3 km, between Dum
Dum and Tollygunge. The metro has 15 underground stations and two
over ground at an average distance of 1.02 km. The approximate
carrying capacity of the metro is 1,73 million passengers a day. The
train was manufactured at the Integral Coach Factory at Chennai.
The Konkan Railway project built at an estimate cost
of 3,375 crore is the largest in the world in the last five decades.
stretching over three states, the 760 km long railway line was
constructed on a BOT (build-operate-transfer) basis. It has 179 major
bridges and 1,819 minor bridges spanning a lineal waterway of 20.5 km
and 92 tunnels aggregating 83.6 km. None of the tunnels are over 2 km
long! It is the longest line constructed in one stretch and became
fully operational on Jan 26, 1998.
There are many other interesting facts about the Indian Railways.
Did you know, for instance, that the Nilgiri Railway uses the only
rack-railway system (between Mettupalayam and Ooty, covering a
distance of 46 km) in the country? This mean’s when the
gradient gets toosteep, a second pair of cylinders on the locomotive
activates a mechanism underneath the engine which engages the toothed
rail in the middle of the track, giving the engine an extra push.
This also happens to be the slowest train in the country, covering
this distance in 4 hr and 25 minutes with an average speed of 10.42
kmph! The Prayagraj Express with 24 bogies, is the longest train. The
Himsagar Express, running between Jammu Tawi and Kanyakumari covering
a distance of 3,726 km, passes through the maximum number of states
(Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan,
Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu Karnataka,
and Kerala). The Thane Creek railway bridge, built in 1854, is the
first railway bridge in the country and the Delhi-on-sone bridge on
river Sone, the longest (3,06 km) one. Karagpur station in West
Bengal has the longest platform and the Kalka-Shimla rail route, the
maximum number of tunnels-102. for more interesting facts about the
Indian Railways, why not look up the Limca Book of Records?
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