RAILWAYS: The grand obsession

By M H Ahssan

World over, railways have inspired the most abiding of passions. They continue to fascinate both the old and the young. Even the Web-savvy generation, born long after the steam locomotives had turned museum pieces, are united by the desire to conserve one of the greatest traditions of the mechanised world. The York Museum in London, for instance, recently launched an exhibition titled ‘India On The Move’, which shows how the subcontinent’s railways continue to be its lifeline. Even as contemporary travellers fly around in jetliners, the romance of rail travel continues to draw aficianados. Don’t have the time to go on a train journey? Worry not. Armchair travel is right at hand, chugs, hoots, rumbles and all.

Top Of The World
The highest railway in the world, hailed for its engineering feats and decried for its ecological and cultural side effects in equal parts, will chug quietly into three years of service come July. Built across some of the most inhospitable terrain ever, the highest point on the Qinghai-Tibet line is 5,072 metres (16,640 ft) at the Tanggula Pass, higher by a good 225 metres than the earlier record held by the Tren de la Sierra (‘mountain train’) from Lima, Peru’s capital, to Huancayo, 335 km away to its east. The Qinghai-Tibet line, which started operations in July 2006 after the laying of 1,140 km of new track from Golmud in central China to Lhasa, makes it possible to reach Lhasa from Beijing in 48 hours. Oxygen is pumped into pressure-sealed cabins to help passengers cope with altitude sickness, ultra-violet filters keep out the sun’s glare, and giant sunshades and ammonia-based cooling pipes have been placed in sections where the permafrost that supports the tracks is known to melt seasonally. On the Xining-Golmund sector, the train passes by the largest lake in China — Qinghai. The Fenghuoshan tunnel, world’s highest railroad tunnel, at an elevation of 4,905 metres (16,093 ft), also falls on this line. Meanwhile, travel restrictions to the Tibet region have kept the highest railway in the world as remote as its location. And as mysterious.

Steamy old times
All said and done, there is no high quite like a trip on one of India’s many grand rail routes. Some of the greatest train journeys in the world race through the subcontinent — or chug valiantly for seven hours over 88 km like the Darjeeling Hill Railway, which was built in 1881. This oldest mountain steam train climbs to 7,400 ft at Ghum, India’s highest railway station, from where the magnificent Kanchenjunga looms as a backdrop. Other unmissable train journeys in India include the Nilgiri Mountain Railway from Mettupalayam to Ooty — the steepest line in Asia, scaling an elevation of 326 metres to 2,203 metres, which runs on a unique ‘rack and pinion system’, and the Kalka-Shimla route, which does a steep, mountainous climb up the Shivalik hills through 102 tunnels. This diminutive triumvirate has each been nominated to the UNESCO World Heritage list, and the UN body describes the Darjeeling Hill Railway’s “bold and ingenious engineering solutions to the problem of establishing an effective rail link across a mountainous terrain of great beauty” as “still the most outstanding example of a hill passenger railway”. Then there is the 20 km-long Neral-Matheran Light Railway, which is also over a hundred years old, and the redoubtable Fairy Queen, the Guinness World Record holder for being the oldest working steam locomotive in the world, now plying between Delhi and Alwar’s tiger country on luxury weekend trips. Enjoy!

A club on rails
Train fans are as reliable as the railways they love. In 2009, the Indian Railways Fan Club (IRFCA), a website dedicated to the serious love for Indian Railways, completes two decades. While some members document the Indian Railways photographically, others are engaged in conservation and awareness building, still others are simply here for ‘railfanning’. Sign-up costs nothing and the site itself is a huge treasure of information that will intrigue even the lay visitor, covering everything from trivia, history and technical explanations to FAQs on rolling stock databases, signalling, operations, railway zones, loco sheds and even tracks classifications, specifications and maintenance. ‘Steam in India’ has a special following of its own. Annual conventions, the latest was held in January in Bangalore, also draw great numbers of enthusiasts. So, if IRFCA is the Indian Railways Fan Club (which, as it categorically states, is not officially affiliated to the Indian Railways), what’s the additional A for? It used to be the Indian Railways Fan Club of America, where the group first started before the rapid spread of the internet turned it global. Today, one of the two biggest contingents of Indian Railways fans is from India.

Between The Lines
When the romance and adventure of rail travel meets the imagination and creative genius of a good writer, classics are born. To really get into the groove of what a railway journey is all about, read Paul Theroux’s timeless 1975 travelogue,
'The Great Railway Bazaar', in which the master travel writer relives an epic train journey across Britain, eastern and western Europe, the Middle East, South and South East Asia, then all the way to Japan, only to return to Britain via Russia. Theroux followed this up with, "The Old Patagonian Express in 1979, journeying again by train across the North American plains then down to Colombia, Patagonia, Peru (including a trip on the Tren de la Sierra) and Bolivia before re-uniting with lost family in Ecuador. Wrap up the grand trilogy with Riding the Iron Rooster, published in 1988, in which Theroux takes China’s great trains, revealing a nation, its people and diverse physical geographies magnificently.

Railways have also been the backdrop of many other classics including Edith Nesbit’s heartwarming The Railway Children (1906), Agatha Christie’’s splendid Murder on Orient Express (1974), and Khushwant Singh’s haunting Train to Pakistan, reprinted as a special 50th anniversary edition in 2006 with Partition photographs by Time Life’s Margaret Bourke-White.

Bring Them Home
These enthusiasts take the passion for trains to a different scale. Live steam aficionados build working models of real locomotives, which can even take passengers. Live steam is usually a reference to a model steam locomotive. Walt Disney famously had a live steam railroad at his California home, which later inspired him to build a narrow gauge track at Disneyland. Also known as the backyard railways, these can be tracked to gardens of rail lovers. This super-specialised hobby has enough enthusiasts around the world to draw expert manufacturers who make model trains and locomotives to exacting specs. Sample some here. Accucraft Trains, a California-based company, specialises in museum-quality fine scale brass models in live steam and electric trains across four distinct product lines. Queensland, Australia-based Argyle Locomotive Works is another maker-retailer of assembly kits and ready-to-run working models of live steam locomotives from the glorious age of steam. But the finest commercial maker of live steam engines is Yokohama-based Aster — it is the benchmark which hobbyists compare models. Even Aster’s catalogue, which is rated a topnotch reference book on the mechanics of model locos, is highly sought after by avid collectors. Others like UK-based Bassett-Lowke, Backshop Miniatures, Brandbright, DJB Engineering, Finescale and good old Hornby tempt even the most resolute soul with exquisitely crafted trains that can be brought home.

The Model Man
For a hobby that draws a legion of enthusiasts overseas, there are only little-known islands of dedication to rail modelling in India. One such is Pune’s Bhau Joshi museum on miniature trains, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, and also sells miniature kits, and raw stock like metal sheets and balsa wood for model builders to work with. But it is Iqbal Ahmed, a machinist and car restorer from Nagpur who holds the Guinness world record for the smallest live steam model (the size of his thumb nail) and has simultaneously won both the first and second spots in one of the world’s foremost miniature machining contests — the 2007 Sherline Machinist’s Challenge held in Ohio — in which he was the lone participant from Asia. Not only has he hand-crafted exquisite models of Mary Beam, vertical steam and Victoria horizontal steam models, his latest live steam model, large enough to carry half a dozen passengers, is that of the legendary Fairy Queen, the oldest steam locomotive in operation today. Astonishingly, most of Ahmed’s tools are indigenous and uniquely adapted for model engineering “It is such a precise job,” he says. “It only needs patience and dedication.

I want to promote this [model engineering] so much in India.” The 62-year-old has ploughed a lonely furrow for the past 40 years, supported on his occasional trips abroad by the Department of Science and Technology, but unable to participate in many other events because the government wants to know, “But why Iqbal Ahmed again and again?” Well, because there is nobody quite like him.