Train > Articles > The West Coast of India by Train

It was still dark when the train left Bombay, and in a way I was grateful. Railways take you through peoples' back yards, and Bombay's back yard is a parade of slum-dwellings and naked fly-bothered children, streaked with dried tears.

As it was, departing at 5:00 am meant we were a couple of hours ahead of daylight, and dawn eventually lifted the curtain on a quite different landscape of dewy rice paddies speckled with mango and cashewnut trees and dotted with haystacks shaped like cottage loaves. Here and there a pair of oxen heaved, a hoe flashed, and bright white cattle egrets picked out the morning sun. I found myself wondering, watching the carpet of coastline slowly unroll, why people should ever forsake such serenity for the squalid urban life we'd just left behind.

We British are, frankly, a bit odd about trains. Few other nations have such a deep-rooted trainspotter tendency, and rare is the railway journey that hasn't been immortalised either by our television or printed media.

We've bequeathed some of that legacy to India, a nation which has taken the train to its heart. Indian Railways is the world's largest employer (1.6 million people), has one of its most comprehensive networks of track (39,000 miles), and carries 10 million passengers a day, most of whom have paid only a few pence for their ticket. For the Indians, long-distance railway journeys are just another part of life's rich tapestry.

But are there such things as trainspotters? I put the question to Raj, the railway executive who'd been sent to escort me. He looked puzzled, so I explained, while trying to recall having seen anyone with a notebook and a thermos on the platform that morning. Raj shook his head; "no anoraks", he said.

The Indian rail network was pioneered in the days of Empire but has become an integral part of contemporary India, and last year saw the opening of a new flagship line, the Konkan Railway, the only new Great Railway Journey of the last decade.

The Konkan tackles 760km of India's tortuous western flank from Bombay through Goa to Mangalore; it took seven years to complete, cost a fortune in rupees - and in human suffering. Seventy-six people were killed making the 92 tunnels and 1,998 bridges, and every monsoon threatens to wreck the whole thing as nonchalantly as a rising tide does a sandcastle. The construction story is one of great endeavour, with the surveyors being sent out on mountain bikes, and one engineer refusing to take a single day off for two years lest his tunnels get the better of him while his back was turned.

The British had considered, and rejected, the idea of running a railway down the Konkan coast. It was simply too wild, too hilly, its soil too soft and too frequently interrupted by rivers to be conquered by the iron road. Furthermore the region's inhabitants were, said W Hancock, controller of railways in 1866, "semi-wild tribes, who live on jungle fruits, rats, roots... they would never travel by rail."

My companions in first class didn't seem semi-wild; two shy software engineers and a very inquisitive lady lawyer, who, once she'd ascertained what I was up to, interrogated one of the engineers about what his wife had packed him for lunch. That's one of the bonuses of Indian rail travel - it injects you into a cross-section of society.

After Ratnagiri I was allowed every schoolboys' dream - a ride in the loco. This wasn't the place for idle conversation; the diesel was thirty years old, hot, windy and noisy, and it had no automated safety systems besides the concentration of its drivers. Asith and his assistant yelled out the signals to each other like parade ground sargeant-majors to ensure they remained alert. If they were to disregard a single signal, said Asith, their careers would be over. And so also, most probably, would the lives of many of the passengers in their train.

It was an almost stroboscopic journey, the train one moment plunged into a dark tunnel, the next sailing high in the sunshine over a deep river valley, with two villagers washing a cow right down below.

The land was wild and empty, but there always seemed to be a human shape lurking in the tunnels. Had he ever run anyone over? I asked Asith. He nodded. In just eight years of driving he'd already had 25 suicides, although all of them had been on the South Central Railway, not the Konkan. On the latter, he said, he was as likely to run over a tiger or a wolf.

We arrived in Madgaon, Goa's commercial capital, as dusk fell, and with far less tribulation than five years back, when the people of Goa had viewed Indian Railways' planned new line as a demonstration of "cultural imperialism", and had gone on hunger strike to get it diverted.

For me, Madgaon was an excuse for an eight-hour break between trains, time enough for a meal in the town and a snooze in the railway retiring rooms before catching my connection in the early hours of the morning.

From here onwards I was no longer in first class, which meant less air conditioning and more conversation. First had been a cross-section of middle class society, but this was a whole village; a geography teacher wanted to know my opinion of the cyclone disaster in Orissa; a policeman on leave was curious why I was travelling alone, and a steady stream of vendors moved through the carriage shouting "diddle-de-dum", "diddle-de-dee" and "plum pudding" - at least that's what it sounded like.

By now we'd left the wilder Konkan. In its place, the diesel unwreathed coils of black smoke over a typical, hard-worked Kerala landscape of coconuts and rice paddies broken occasionally by broad sluggish rivers and clattering bridges.

J ust before we arrived at Cochin, 36 hours and 1,336 kms after leaving Bombay, a friendly ticket inspector brought me a sprig of lime leaves to crush in my fingers. It was as refreshing as any airline towel, but unlike an airline towel, the lime leaves reeked of India.

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