Bibek Debroy - Indian Railways. The Weaving of a National Tapestry

My heart is warm with the friends I make,

And better friends Ill not be knowing

Yet there isnt a train I wouldnt take,

No matter where its going.

Edna St Vincent Millay

Every Indian seems to have at least one impossibly romantic railway memory. Mine is of a journey from Kalka to Shimla when I was five. From the window of our train, my family and I feasted, for the first time, on the snow-tipped crests of the Himalayas. With each bend of the winding track, we passed green slope after green slope, their tiers of neatly cultivated terraces looking like gardens hanging in the air. Belts of pine, fir and deodar punctuated the terraces, and masses of rhododendrons clothed the slopes. Below, towards the south, the Ambala plains seemed to recede as the Sabathu and Kasauli hills appeared in the foreground. To the north rose the confused Himalayan mountain chains, range after snowy range.

The train stopped at Barog, where we ate the most delicious puri-alu. The station was named after a railway engineer named Barog, who had built the infamous tunnel number thirty-three, as the authors of this volume inform us. He started to dig the tunnel from opposite ends of the mountain, hoping that the digging parties would meet in the centre. But they did not, and Barog shot himself and his dog, unable to bear the ignominy. The railway company then hired a certain Baba Bhalku, who apparently had the ability to tap on the mountain wall with a stick and tell from the sound where it could be dug. Bhalku became a legend and helped to build all the tunnels to Shimla.

One of Bhalkus last tunnels was at Shogi, where we had our first wondrous vision of Shimla. From afar, it looked like a mythical, green-carpeted garden dotted with red-roofed Swiss chalets. My excitement mounted as we neared. We passed Jutogh, crossed Summer Hill, turned into tunnel number 103, and finally reached Shimlas Victorian railway station. By then I had fallen in love with the railway, and ever since, whenever I have heard a train whistle, I have wished, like Edna St Vincent Millay, that I were on that train. But these longings are dying rapidly in an age of railway mediocrity that has crept insidiously upon India during the past two generations.

Indian Railways: The Weaving of a National Tapestry by Bibek Debroy, Sanjay Chadha and Vidya Krishnamurthi is a charming attempt to recapture the power and poetry of the building of, and travel on, the railways in India, from the mid-nineteenth century to Independence. It is hard to imagine that the men who built the railways belonged to a profession of heroes, but this is exactly what our authors show in the lives of engineers like Rowland Stephenson, John Chapman and Arthur Cotton in this lively tenth volume of Penguins The Story of Indian Business. Stephenson dreamt of connecting London and Calcutta by rail, which would reduce the journey between England and its Indian empire to ten days; he also wanted to link Calcutta with Peking and Hong Kong.

Arthur Cotton was a hero to my engineer father. When I was a child, I remember listening to my father speak enthusiastically about Cottons idea of connecting our subcontinent with inland waterways as an alternative to the railways. To connect Indias rivers and form a robust system of inland water transportation was not a hare-brained ideait was seriously debated in the British parliament in the nineteenth century. The railways won in the end, in part because of a powerful lobby. Ever since, I have nostalgically wondered whether, if India had also invested in inland waterways for transport, we might not have got the side benefit of irrigating our arid lands and making our agriculture less vulnerable while also providing cheap transport to the people. The authors of this book give a fascinating account of this controversy of railways-vs-inland waterways in a dialogue between the anonymous P and C.