The glorious railways of India
On a freezing cold night which affected the attendance we welcomed John Sloane to cover Indian railways. He initially outlined the nine Railways into which the system was divided to serve this huge country, the 4th largest in the world! At the time of his first visit in early 1976 there were some 9000 steam engines in the country with approaching half belonging to just 4 classes but with an incredible variety of locomotive classes in the remaining half.
Starting with the Western Railway we saw scenes of trains on three different gauges. In Bombay an H class 4-6-0 built in Glasgow was seen whilst another featured in a fine shot with two WG 2-8-2’s at Vadodara depot, all in steam. Moving to Ahmedabad gave us a passenger train from Virama with WP class 7697 in front. Around this area we were shown many metre gauge locomotive types in full flow including a rare B class No. 31020, a 4-4-0 at Bhavnagar together with numerous narrow-gauge types.
Another fascinating shot was of a MacArthur class 2-8-2 with a bicycle attached to the smokebox!! A typical indication of Indian bureaucracy was that photography was sometimes not allowed in certain sheds but they were quite happy to drag them out of the shed to photograph!!!! To add to the picture engines of the same class had different liveries depending on which Railway they operated on.
Onto the Northern Railway in the Delhi area was a nice shot of SGC class 36696 in the Junction shed. In addition, many other engines here, several SGC 0-6-0’s and WW 0-6-2T’s. Delhi Junction station had 2 gauges, an interesting mix. At Delhi Museum the amazing ex Patiala 0-3-0 monorail loco was seen at work.
On the Central Railway, Kurduvadi, Gwalior and Dholpur were visited and at the latter we saw a nice XA/1 Pacific together with a narrow gauge 4-8-0 and several 2-8-4 tanks one of which stopped and offered John a cab-ride. This also happened on the Delhi- Agra express, the fastest train in India at the time! At Bombay Parel Works bureaucracy came to the fore as photography wasn’t permitted within the works so an XA was used to drag an H/4 2-8-0 through the works gate so the pair could be photographed.
We saw that the metre gauge Northeastern Railway extended into Agra which was thus served by no less than 4 different Railways. At Varanasi a sign before a bridge asked people not to travel on the roof whilst another shot demonstrated that children had been throwing mudpies at the train. Another excellent picture at Varanasi showed WP 2738 departing on a lengthy passenger service.
On the Eastern Railway between Patna and Calcutta we saw XC Pacific’s together with 2-8-0’s and the huge XE 2-8-2’s required for the traffic from the coal mining area. The XE loco carried a massive boiler yet was only hand fired, a real brute. In the Arrah and Dehri areas we also saw various interesting private narrow gauge and industrial systems.
The staggering array of steam engines and the scale of territory covered was amazing, so much so that after a superb session, John agreed to return next year to finish this fascinating topic.
Highly recommended
Alan Sattenstall