Instead of car rental India offers a wide selection of railways which is a more interesting way to travel across the country.
The age of steam
Steam locomotives are officially on the scrap-heap. (Rumour had it that the constant pilfering of coal was a major factor in the fate of steam.) Luckily, one famous route has been reprieved, that of the line to Udhagamandalam (Ooty) in the Nilgiris. The famous line up to Darjeeling in the Himalayas has recently been converted to diesel traction but still occasionally runs steam engines. Tweed and Mersey (1873 vintage) unfortunately no longer get up steam each winter to cart sugar cane on the metre gauge east of Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh. However Tipong Colliery in Assam still runs two narrow-g gauge steam locomotives, and the Riga sugar ) mill in Bihar sometimes uses a metre-gauge, steam engine to haul sugar cane.
There seems to be a change of heart at the railway ministry as they realize the tourist 3 potential of running steam services (particularly on the popular hill services). There are plans to resume steam traction on the Matheran railway near Mumbai, and as well as “specials” there are the yearly steam-hauled Royal Orient and Fairy Queen luxury tourist trains.
Prime lines
Not all progress is forwards. Until 1994 the traveler could cover the entire subcontinent by one gauge, but since then the metric has been sacrificed to a broader option that does not (nor probably ever will) have such extensive coverage. However, the broad-gauge network stretches from Ledo in eastern Assam to Bhuj in western Gujarat, a journey of 3,776 km (2,346 miles); and from Kanniyakumari in the south to Jammu Tawi in the north, 3,581 km (2,225 miles). The journeys take you through some startling changes of scenery: from the lush rhino tracks of the Brahmaputra, through the rice paddies of West Bengal and the wheat fields of Uttar Pradesh, to the flat desert of the Rann of Kutch; or, from tropical Kerala, over the high Deccan Plateau, down to the Ganga Plain, and then up, through the foothills, to the edge of the Himalayas.
The coasts on both sides of the subcontinent offer some fine scenery but the Coromandel leading to Chennai is more impressive. With the new length of Konkan Railway from Mumbai to Mangalore, a fabulous stretch of coastal scenery has opened up. Probably the most sensational coastal run of all is to Ramesvaram, on the isle of Pamban. Until a storm obliterated it in 1965, this line ran another 20 km (12 miles) along a narrow spit of sand to Danushkodi.
Inland, the hill railways of India are famous for their character and quaintness. Not far from Mumbai is the climb to Matheran by tiny narrow-gauge stock. Darjeeling’s toy railway is well known. Ooty’s also is widely loved but, contrary to popular notions about its “rack” (which only runs as far as Coonoor), this is not a narrow-gauge railway but metric. Whereas the Darjeeling engines were Scottish, those that push up the Ooty train are Swiss, with an extra set of pistons to work the rack mechanism. While the hill line to Simla is famous for its 103 tunnels, a better view of the Himalayan Peaks can be had from its sister narrow-gauge line that runs through the Kangra Valley.
The world’s highest broad-gauge track is notable for the triple-headed trains that carry iron ore for export from Kirinul to the port of Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, a modern engineering triumph of Indian expertise. A daily mixed train from Vizag runs up this line and over the Eastern Ghats to the Adivasi capital of Bas-tar. Other impressive crossings, this time of the Western Ghats, are from Tenkasi to Quilon and the newer and more dramatic alignment from Mangalore to Hassan. Yet another memorable ghat line is over the Aravalli range from Jodhpur to Udaipur in Rajasthan, past craggy forests and the highest point on the Western Railway.
