Ticket to Ride

by Tom Chesshyre

Peter goes on to explain that he was brought up close to a famous scrapyard for steam trains and carriages in South Wales: the Barry scrapyard, run by the Woodham brothers. This was when his interest in trains began. The Woodhams had contracts with British Rail to dispose of withdrawn carriages and steam locomotives, and in the 1960s they had collected so many steam locos that enthusiasts would come from far and wide to see them. As the scrap metal from carriages was easier to extract – and as there were many more carriages than locos – the Woodhams had concentrated on carriages first, leaving the locos for later. This is where the rail enthusiasts stepped in. While on their train pilgrimages to Barry, many visiting enthusiasts decided to buy the locomotives with the aim of restoring them to working order, so the Barry scrapyard is important in trainspotter circles.

  Chance encounters can lead to chance train knowledge.

  Peter is in another carriage. Mine is packed to the rafters with passengers, luggage and parcels. I'm in second class on the Himalayan Queen Express; there is no first class on this service, although there is on other Kalka–Shimla trains. I'm on a narrow, hard, faux-leather bench-seat, sitting next to a man with glasses and a pale-blue shirt with a pen poking out of a pocket.

  Opposite me a twenty-something American couple are whispering to one another and eating curry with rice from plastic trays that have been handed to them through the window as we wait for departure. The American woman has dyed orange-red hair and wears large spectacles, while her companion sports a stubbly beard and is in a baseball cap with CAL on it. They look 'alternative'. We are the only westerners in the carriage, which is enclosed so you cannot walk into connecting carriages.

  With a blast of a horn, we move off, the carriage swaying and creaking. We ease past a railway crossing where a skinny man is in charge of a downtrodden camel laden with baggage. Cows with ribs like staircase rails poke about in rubbish in a gutter. Battered old corrugated-iron buildings, roofs secured with stones, line the track. They've got a house-of-cards look, as though the slightest wind might bring them down. We enter thick, tunnel-like jungle that opens out now and then to allow glimpses of hillside with purple jacaranda trees. This train begins at 640 metres and rises to 2,060 metres through the Shivalik Mountains, passing through precisely 102 tunnels.

  My neighbour introduces himself. His name is Jyotirmoy Dutta, aged 40, a 'central-government supervisor, securities department' from Kolkata. He has very little English but communicates the basics as the train slides out of the jungle back to a neighbourhood of rundown housing.

  'This is slum area,' he says, then shuts up. He seems pleased to have made an acquaintance; he's already given me his email and phone number, should I ever visit Kolkata and be in need of assistance. He proceeds to gaze out of the window.

  The couple opposite have been listening to our stilted encounter. They introduce themselves as Aimee and Ben from San Francisco. She works for a tenants' rights group, while he is a lawyer.

  'It's all about the balance of power,' says Aimee. 'We need to shift it in favour of tenants. There have been two hundred per cent rent increases. Displacement. Wealthy foreigners are coming from out of town. Chinese.' Combined with the wealth generated by some Silicon Valley companies, it is putting pressure on the renting residents of San Francisco.

  They are about to embark on a nine-day trek through the Spiti Valley. They had also been on the New Delhi–Kalka train. 'It's a totally different experience to the US. Really great. We were surprised that we were fed,' says Ben. 'In the US there's a car culture. Sure, there's a train infrastructure but it's mainly for freight. They're slow. It's an eight-hour drive from LA to San Francisco, or a fifteen-hour train. So nobody takes the trains.'

  They had bought their curries by mistake, after someone on the platform asked them if they were having food on board; they had thought it was part of the service. 'We didn't mind,' says Ben. 'We just said, "yeah".' The meals had cost them 300 rupees (£2.70).

  Ben begins to talk about English football (he supports Reading FC) and cricket, which he enjoys for its 'relaxed nature: you don't have to pay attention the whole time, you can have it on in the background – the commentators are a refreshing change from Americans shouting and yelling'. I don't think I've ever met an American cricket fan before.

  With Ben discussing goals scored by John Salako and saves made by Brad Friedel, the scenery becomes increasingly dramatic as we ascend, cutting through cedar forests and breaking into open patches with clear views across the Himalayan foothills. It's the most beautiful part of the ride yet, with mist hanging on the horizon and shafts of sunlight filtering through, turning the landscape vivid green. All eyes of those still awake (several passengers are fast asleep, with the sound of gentle snores emanating across the carriage) are on the hills. Blackbirds sail high in the sky. Villages cling to mountainsides in colourful clusters of single-storey buildings. Farmers with bags balanced on heads stop to watch us pass. The train snakes upwards at such a gentle pace you could almost run alongside. On bends, it's possible to look back along the train behind; this is the best moment for pictures, and you can stick your head out of the window. At one end of the carriage a door has been left open to allow in extra air. We pause at Kumarhatti station at 1,579 metres, where there's a poster of Gandhi on a wall, before rising onwards. In places the mountain shoots down below so steeply that a few metres from the track you might tumble to a terrible death.

  The Kalka–Shimla Railway was completed in 1903, and opened by Lord Curzon, the viceroy of India. There had been a dozen years of planning and building, with the tunnels being the most time consuming aspect. Shimla – or Simla, as it was then known – had been the summer capital of British India since 1864, so this was a key project. With temperatures in pre-air-conditioning days so high, the decision had been made to move the British administration from Calcutta to the mountains, initially making use of a (slow) road that Lord Dalhousie had ordered to ease trade with Tibet. A technical report on the feasibility of a railway was conducted in 1890, with engineers keen to replicate the success of another important mountainous narrow-gauge line, completed between Darjeeling and New Jalpaiguri in 1881 (its import lying in its transportation of a much-loved commodity back in Britain: tea).

  As well as the Kalka–Shimla Railway's 102 tunnels, construction also required 800 bridges and 900 curves. This was a logistical nightmare – and one part of the track involves a sad tale. Workers, overseen by a Colonel Barog, had attempted to cut a tunnel through a section of mountain, but there was a problem: the colonel had misjudged the points at which the ends – being dug simultaneously from both sides of the mountain – would meet. Humiliated by his mistake, he is said to have gone for a walk with his dog and shot first his dog and then himself. The replacement tunnel is now known as the Barog tunnel and, on the Shimla side, this is where the train stops for a short while, at Barog station, to allow passengers to buy snacks from stalls on the platform.

  As we pass through the Barog tunnel, kids in the neighbouring carriage howl like wolves (as they do in all the tunnels) and the drivers blast the horn a few times. I buy a bright-yellow lentil lunch when we arrive at Barog, and somehow convince the drivers to let me join them in the cab of the train for a couple of stops.

  This is my first 'footplate ride'; Charlie back in Kosovo would, I think, be quite jealous.

  Being up front puts a whole new perspective on the journey. The main driver wears a blue shirt with a few buttons undone and a string vest beneath. He has a gold watch, and a smartphone pokes out of a pocket. He sits on the right. A younger man in a similar shirt is to the left. His job is to switch on the headlights in tunnels, and to sound the horn as and when he sees fit. The main driver's task is to control a lever determining acceleration. Our standard speed is 14–16 mph (22–25 kmph). I perch on a shelf-like seat behind them and watch. Apart from the main driver telling me that the fan in the cab is not working and that the locomotive was made in 2014 and is number 705, we do not exchange a word.


  From the cab there's an even greater sense of the twists and turns. We rattle and squeal along. Indicators on grimy monitors show engine rpm and lub oil temp. The man on the left flicks the light switch with great show as we enter and depart a tunnel. The horn is blasted many times. There are bleeping sounds. Through the front grille peaks appear as we curve round cliff faces. The gradient of this track is one in 33.

  On the floor by my feet is a curious, loop-shaped object with a metal key attached. When we stop at a station, where I get out to return to the carriage, this loop is handed to a stationmaster, whereupon the driver is given a different loop, known as a 'token'. This is a method, developed in the nineteenth century in Britain, used to ensure that trains cannot collide with one another on the single track. I have bought a book entitled The Toy Train by local historian Raaja Bhasin that helps explain this and other safety precautions. Bhasin describes how signals can only be altered using a key attached to each token. He goes on to say that each linesman between Kalka and Shimla is responsible for nine kilometres of track. If an obstruction such as a landslip or fallen tree is discovered, firecrackers are placed on the rails in each direction. These will explode when a train's wheels pass over them, thus warning the driver to apply the brakes.

  Crackers in more than one sense perhaps, though it seems to work.

  There are two principal historical points of interest at stations along the Kalka–Shimla line. The first is the Tara Devi station, where the British Central Investigation Department used to conduct much-resented checks on passenger names to monitor the movements of freedom fighters. The second is the halfway station of Solan, where we pass close to the Solan brewery. British troops stationed in India during the Raj had a taste for beer, but attempts to create breweries had failed, so beer in the mid nineteenth century had to be shipped in from the UK. The problem was that it did not always survive the long journey. This is, as Bhasin points out, why Indian Pale Ale was invented: it was a type of beer that lasted the trip better. Several further breweries were attempted in India, but the one at Solan, with the freshwater supplies from the mountains and its connection to the Kalka–Shimla train, was the breakthrough. 'When the railway line arrived in 1903, it ran right through the brewery,' says Bhasin. Cases of bottles would be sent on wagons across the country.

  No trains, no beer – or, at least, not as much as was needed.

  At Tara Devi, my neighbour Jyotirmoy Dutta disembarks, after tapping me on the shoulder: 'Do you mind selfie?'

  He has been quiet for the journey, listening to Ben and me wittering on about the qualities of Gillingham FC's Andy Hessenthaler and an exciting 2–1 victory for Reading FC against Norwich: 'We came from behind. Then we played Cardiff and that was terrible. Alex Pearce scored an own goal and got a red card: he won't like to be reminded of that.' Ben really does know a lot about the English football league.

  Jyotirmoy takes selfies with me and the Americans.

  'So very good! This is best!'

  He hops off the train and heads off to carry out securities department work, clinging to a backpack, a suitcase and a copy of The Sunday Times.

  Not so long afterwards, we pull into Shimla – the end of the line.

  Up in the mountains

  Shimla

  Some places are 'railway towns'. Crewe felt like that, of course, as it would not have existed without its railway. Shimla is another.

  I am to spend three days adapting to mountain life here at Shimla, which some regard as the real centre of power during the Raj, as so many officials passed more than just the summer months in its pleasant environs. One fifth of the world's population was once governed from this out-of-the-way spot in the hills. And the railway was a crucial tie to the outside world.

  Shimla station hangs on the edge of a precipice, close to the heart of the old town and facing a curve of mountain dotted with precarious-looking properties. More than 800,000 people live on the various slopes that count as Shimla, many in an incredibly packed section known as Little Shimla, where I sincerely hope there is never a major earthquake, as the consequences would be dire.

  It feels like a railway town not only because trains have long provided such an important connection. It is the 'train sounds' of Shimla, which are unlike any I have heard elsewhere. Standing in the city centre, where the main government buildings are to be found, horns echo upwards across corrugated roofs and down narrow lanes. Drivers are not shy; the blasts emanate every minute or so, with trains coming and going with regularity. They have a soothing, comforting quality, accompanied by the rumble of wheels and slither of steel on the tracks. Through the thin, cool air beneath the pale-blue sky, trains are going about their business. A dash downwards from the statue of Indira Gandhi by The Ridge, the main square, and you could be at the platforms in minutes, soon heading to 'reality' down on the plains.

  Just up from the station, you come to the Oberoi Cecil Hotel, a prominent structure with parts dating from the 1880s, where many Toy Train visitors have rested over the years. It is also where Rudyard Kipling took a room and wrote some of his stories, quite possibly including The Man Who Would Be King, which has a section describing the 'very awful' conditions on Indian thirdclass trains, where passengers are sometimes carted out dead in hot weather. The protagonists meet in one of these carriages and discuss the 'politics of Loaferdom, that sees things from the underside where the lath and plaster is not smoothed off', with the narrator memorably describing his new companion as 'a wanderer and vagabond like myself, but with an educated taste in whisky'.

  Kipling visited each year from 1885 to 1888 during his annual leave from work on a newspaper in Lahore. This was before the Kalka–Shimla trains: 'My month's leave at Simla… was pure joy – every golden hour counted. It began in heat and discomfort, by rail and road. It ended in the cool evening, with a wood fire in one's bedroom, and the next morn – thirty more of them ahead! – the early cup of tea, the Mother who brought it in, and the long talks of us all together again. One had leisure to work, too, at whatever play-work was in one's head, and that was usually full.'

  The ghosts of the railway-building British occupy these hilltops.

  I'm staying at the Cecil, close to the Mall, with its promenade of little wooden shops and Scandal Point – a junction associated with a maharaja said to have had an affair with a viceroy's daughter. Viceregal Lodge, the mock-Tudor summer residence of the British viceroys, where Nehru and Gandhi came in the 1940s to negotiate Indian independence, is just round the corner.

  My grandfather, Neville Chesshyre, who was brought up in a military family, came to Shimla as a child in the 1910s, and once told me that he remembered only two cars in the town: one belonging to the viceroy, the other to the commander-in-chief of the army. Now most streets, other than the Mall, which is pedestrianised, are jammed with vehicles.

  My grandfather also remembered that there were coolies, four to each rickshaw. Amazingly (to me, at least, being a novice visitor to India), a sign above a shadowy doorway at Shimla station still says: COOLIE SHELTER. On a walk back to the station one day, I go to take a look. Surely it has been kept up as a historical curiosity to remind modern travellers of how things once were.

  Before I even arrive, I realise it is nothing of the sort. On the way to the station, a hunched elderly man heaves two large bags on his back, with an ample-sized, able-bodied couple strolling a few yards behind. It is an extraordinary sight.

  Down in the station I find the coolie shelter is a dimly lit room with a wooden bench along the wall and a dozen rolls of bedding next to bags of possessions. This is the home of the coolies, the porters who carry bags to hotels up the steep hill; the days of people-carrying rickshaws are long gone.

  Mr Karim is tall and gaunt. He has a ramrod-straight stance and is wearing a red porter's vest and enormous trainers. He is aged 65 and has been a coolie for 40 years. I ask him if it is hard work at his age.

  'No! Strong!' he says, straightening his back.

  He says that the
coolies are paid 50–100 rupees (about 50p–£1) for a typical load.

  He clicks his heels, military style, shakes my hand, and strides to the edge of the platform. A train is arriving.

  I watch Mr Karim go, then look at the old red locos at one end of the station. There's a giant turntable here so trains can be serviced at one spot, then spun round and returned to sidings. Monkeys dance along electricity wires and on the station roof (do not try to eat anything in the open at Shimla station: the monkeys will have it). I poke my head into the empty REFRESHMENT ROOM (VEG) and regard two half-asleep officials in the peculiarly named ELECTRIC COMPLAINT ROOM (perhaps for complaints sent by email) next to the quite separate COMPLAINT-CUM-SUGGESTION ROOM. Then I return up the hill to the comforts of the Oberoi Cecil Hotel.

  Meeting the colonel Dharamshala, and Pathankot Cantt to New Delhi

  The temples of train-less Dharamshala are splendid: a riot of gold, pink, saffron and blue; thick with incense; humming with intonation; busy with pilgrims in flip-flops and cross-legged burgundy-robed monks… Though Dr Dorji and the Office of His Holiness are unable to arrange an audience with the Dalai Lama. He has, apparently, 'taken to his room'.

  On the way there, however, I lay eyes on another legendary name. While eating lunch on the terrace of Wildflower Hall, just outside Shimla, I happen to sit two tables from Sonia Gandhi, wife of the former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi (who was assassinated in 1991), and her daughter Priyanka. She is, I gather from the hotel manager, overseeing the interior design of a nearby Himalayan home for Priyanka and the only snatch of conversation I make out is: 'The televisions: we can't get them to work, you know.' She's talking to someone who appears to be a foreman on the project. She has a moon-like forehead and upright stature, and is dressed in a flowing milk-coloured sari.