Distinguished author Paul Theroux has written a great many books on travel; especially train travel. In one of his travel books he says that he never saw a train go by without wishing he was on it. I know that feeling.
Unlike air travel which is soulless and impersonal, train travel offers the traveler a chance to escape - from a dead-end job, a stressful life, an unhappy personal event. It offers a chance to assume a new identity, reinvent oneself.
And of all types of train travel, steam train travel was undoubtedly the most enjoyable. Steam engines have gone the way of the dodo, and I doubt there are any railways in the world that use steam engines anymore.
But I still have memories from thirty years ago, when as a child, my parents and I would make the annual pilgrimage to visit my grandparents up in the Indian Himalayas. Nowadays, there is a reasonably good highway from Delhi, as well as a couple of high-speed trains (high-speed by Indian standards, anyway).
But thirty years ago, there was just one meter-gauge train from the Indian city of Agra in the congested plains of North India. That train was the Kumaon Express, so named because it transported travelers from the city to Agra to the Kumaon Himalayas. And best of all, that train was pulled by what looked like a toy steam train engine. The engine had a distinctive whistle that sounded like a boy on the cusp of puberty. It was shrill and broke when it hit the high notes. In Bengali, we used to call it “bhangaa-gola”, or “broken voice”.
How mightily the little steam train huffed and puffed to cover the three hundred and fifty kilometers to our destination! Its maximum speed was about thirty kilometers an hour. At that speed, the whole train compartment would shudder and shake, and it felt like it would come apart at the seams.
The train journey was an overnight one. All through the cold foggy winter night, the train would travel through the fertile plains of North India, with its distinctive whistle blowing.
In the morning, you woke up to winter mist and fog, and little stations in the verdant green fields of the Indian terai. The train stations would suddenly loom through the fog, and you felt you had suddenly gone back in time. The stations looked and felt like they were lost in time; shades of Stewart Granger and Ava Gardner in that old Hollywood classic “Bhowani Junction”.
Tea-sellers rushed through the morning fog, selling tea in small matkas (earthenware pots). Porters (known in India as coolies) rushed hither and yon pursued by harried passengers looking for their train compartments. The cries of hawkers shattered the early morning silence, as the train leisurely ambled its way through places with names like as Lalkuan, Kicchha and Baheri.
The journey would finally end at the last railhead – the Kathgodam train station, where the pine and oak trees of my beloved Himalayan foothills would suddenly come into view. Although I would be covered in soot and coal ash, my spirits would rise as the Himalayan foothills appeared on the horizon. They were the land of Jim Corbett and tigers. They promised everything I craved for – deep, dark forests, cool, crisp mountain air and best of all, the sight of those snow-covered titans in the distance.
The train would finally stop, its labors complete for the day. With a huge whooshing sound, the engine would finally shudder to a halt, sounding like a marathon runner with respiratory problems breasting the tape at the end of a race.
Today, there are broad-gauge, comparatively high-speed trains that cover the same distance within a much shorter time. But I will always remember the Kumaon Express fondly. It was the little train that could. It was the train that took me home.
