A TRAIN JOURNEY....

We are justifiably proud of our railways. We have perhaps the longest network if you exclude Russia China and the USA.  As we say we have one of the most extensive railway system (in our version of English "one of the" is always followed by a singular noun) in the world. Unfortunately where we used to have a lot of diversity in the form of different gauges (track widths) now we just have one. Gone is the excitement of starting the journey on one gauge to arrive on another after switching trains somewhere along the way. Gone also is the childish pleasure of seeing a quaint "toy train" of the narrowest gauge and the even greater fun of traveling in one, all hunched and crushed together. Then there was the meter gauge (exactly a meter in width) which was all we had in the South for a while unless you counted a track that sneaked, like a dog that has been caught squarely by a well-aimed young boy's stone, out of Madras and wound its way down to Coimbatore and thence to Cochin. The meter gauge went from left to right, top to bottom and then diagonally for good measure, on a map of peninsular India. My dad, getting on a bit and thus prone to dispensing arcane and at times inane bits of information from his childhood, points out that a meter gauge line ran from Murmugoa (Margaon in modern times) to Machlipatam (the modern day Machlipatnam, or fish town in Telugu), right across the peninsula from west to east, connecting two colonial enclaves- the Portuguese one on the west to the French one on the east with a broad swathe in between of what the Brits preferred to believe was their territory. A resourceful uncle of mine claims to have shipped, when there was some sort of disruption to the Broad Gauge line, trainloads of coal to his factory deep South from the north using only the meter gauge tracks, whose existence was mostly unknown to all except a crafty few.

There was an apocryphal story circulating in the form of an email some time back that the width of the railway track was determined by the width of the rear ends of two horses. Without getting into a discussion how this could have been so or on equine rear ends, suffice it to say that the story has a certain authentic ring to it. History being what it is it is entirely plausible that that's how railway systems evolved. The thing of greater interest isn't so much how railways evolved, as the evolution of rear ends of differing widths of the same genus for, if equine rear ends were what decided the gauge widths, then equine rear ends themselves must have been of differing widths. Not to mention rear ends of horsey women the like of which seem to populate Royal houses especially the English speaking ones. A friend once remarked that a certain British royal had a face like the rear end of a cow but I think he let his dislike of cows overwhelm his better judgement. Whichever animal it was, the likeness of royal faces to animal rear ends is not in dispute. Speaking for myself  I am always reminded of Bombay double-deck buses when I see the face of a certain page 3 personality in Mumbai - and then again I might be doing those sturdy buses an injustice.

A certain gauge is also known as the "Indian Gauge". It is clearly an honour to India that a specific track gauge is named after it. Unfortunately no one else seems to care for it and thus it is in use nowhere else. A pity. It could possibly be the width of the rear-end of a pair of Indian oxen. Now most of our tracks are being converted to this gauge in order to "standardize"  it and increase interoperability (yet another American abomination in which the modern world abounds). Standardizing is not to the "standard gauge" which shall remain confined to some urban transport projects, I understand.

Whichever gauge, whatsoever their origin, whatever the length and direction of journey, all our stations smell the same - of human excrement. Our trains do too. A friend who is now a British citizen has strong views on this saying that when a nation is full of some stuff the latter shows up everywhere. But we have made progress in the matter of railway smells. The purely biological nature of the railway platform smells have been replaced by the combined ones of powerful disinfectants and excrement vying with each other to overpower the other, succeeding only in overwhelming poor travelers such as me. I hanker for the days of steam locomotives when the stations seemed less filthy - is it a trick of the imagination or simply the cleaning power of steam? I remember those locomotives used to belch substantial quantities of steam with almighty roars. Or may be it was that the combined odour of the steam and coal smoke masked the fetid ones.

The train normally arrives covered in what can only be described as dried up remnants of one giant vomit. I cannot for the life of me fathom why anyone would want to get inside something looking so uninviting. There is much jostling shoving and pushing and a general rush to get inside this vomit-covered steel worm.They all must have something important to get to. Once inside things aren't much better except that while the smell of vomit permeates you don't actually see any signs of it. Most of the time. This is all oh so relativistic - I am told that inside worm holes in space you don't notice time. Or mass or distance. Or something. If I was inside a worm I wouldn't want to notice anything. I wouldn't want to be inside any worm at all in the first instance; good job too that I shall be cremated and not buried when I go and thus will not wind up inside any worm..

The insides of our trains look like they have been put together by an army of children with very few tools, even fewer skills and no training at all. It is symbolic of our penchant for the simple life - if something can be done simply and made functional, then why bother with aesthetics? One of the cornerstones of our way of life is the abjuration of anything remotely resembling comfort; for self or for others. We practice it in our trains. As much thought as an amoeba can muster has gone into safety devices too. Spurred no doubt by the results of a previous accident enquiry commission the railways decides to place inside each Air-conditioned coach a hammer with which to break the window glass in order to make one's escape in the event of an accident. Except that then they proceed to screw the lid tight on this hammer. Now you are required to break the glass to get the hammer with which to break the window glass to escape......except some moron forgot to place a hammer inside the little box before sealing it closed. There is however a helpful outline of a hammer painted in red should you wonder what the little glass box is meant for.

Our trains used to be divided into Passenger Trains, Express Trains and Mail Trains. Then there was the Goods Train. You normally didn't want to take the last named unless you are the "Guard" who flagged it on and off with green and red flags which were nearly indistinguishable  from the business end of the train where the driver's spartan office was located. This last named  was definitely not the proverbial corner office, but was warm, spartan black, noisy and offered, if you leaned out dangerously far, sufficient visibility a mile ahead, assuming of course that you  were not myopic. If you were myopic or colour blind you didn't tell anyone about that. Actually it didn't matter. Although it appeared as if the train's movements were controlled by the waving of red and green flags by the "Guard" or at night time by the waving of oil-lit lanterns with red and green lenses, these movements were largely symbolic (not at all shambolic, mind you) and meant for the gawping young boys (girls were generally uninterested in trains except the wedding train). The optimistically named Guard was usually someone too old to drive the train and obviously myopic, with thick eye-glasses. He could hardly guard himself let alone the whole train. But the thing worked on confidence. He acted like he wasn't bothered and generally no-one did bother him. 

The Passenger Trains were meant to carry, well, passengers. They stopped at all stations. They worked on the principle that it is not important when you got to any place so long as you got there. Passengers generally shunned the eponymous trains. Except when it was important to be seen to be making an effort to go some place. Or when they  wished to collect extra daily allowances - the passenger trains were guaranteed to enable you to claim 2 days' worth for a journey that should normally take half a day (usually no allowance for half a day). If passenger trains stopped at all stations, the Express Trains stopped in between the stations and thus the only difference between the two is that lights on the latter worked at night - usually. The express trains also gave their name to a type of coffee, no doubt on account of the copious amounts of steamy noises they made as did the eponymous coffee making machines. The Mail trains carried, well, mail and also important people. The passengers on a Mail train seemed to have a certain je ne sais quoi, and a swagger when they strolled at a wayside station. They looked askance at the passengers on a passenger train and those on an express train. Mail traveled on these trains. So if you wrote a letter and decided to travel to the letter's destination the same day, you would arrive earlier than the letter which kind of defeats the entire purpose of  the mail and mail trains. Some newspapers were named Express and some Mail and the latter mostly concerned themselves with the lives of attractive babes. I am not aware of any named after Passenger trains.

These days mails travel on something called the internet which no one has seen, but which  most people swear by and which appears to work most of the time. Somewhat like God.