Train Travel in India – Nostalgia

I used to be fascinated by trains in India.

Long trailing things on wheels, carrying lots and lots of people, going from place to place; stopping at stations and signals, crossing bridges, going through tunnels, bearing vendors, ticket collectors and all sorts of people, people and people.

My first fairly long train journey in memory is when we traveled by the then Cochin Mail from Madras to Ernakulam back in 1970 I think. It was a diesel engined train, hurrah and it was fast. (Fast? It covered perhaps a 500 km distance in 15 hours).

The next was on a slow train from Madras to Hyderabad by a steam locomotive pulled train stopping at all kinds of places such as sullurpetta, nayudupetta, gudur, nellore, bitragunta, ongole and so on till it made a spectacular

crossing across the river krishna into the lighted city of Vijayawada. What a thrill it was to a 9 year old boy, to actually ride over a river on a train! The train went through several locomotive changes on its journey to Hyderabad, the major halt being at Kazipet. Then on, it was a fast zip through the Deccan plateau, with halts at seemingly unimportant places like Bhongir, Jangaon, Maula Ali and finally the grand halt at Secundrabad. My desire to travel all the way to Hyderabad by train was cut short by my father who saved time by getting us off at Secundrabad and taxiing us to my uncle’s place.

2nd class train journeys in India are fun. You meet the unlikliest of people, people who pour our their hearts and become your best friends, sharing the food that they have brought, negotiating deals with vendors and the like.

Such fun ceases to exist in plane journeys, when there is a compulsion to get to your destination as soon as you can. More on this later.