When scrap is not actually scrap

Some of the old, disused coaches auctioned by Indian Railways have heritage value; others provide shelter for the homeless

Ever wondered what happens to old, disused, condemned railway coaches? Actually, they are worth a lot to a whole lot of people. Indian Railways (IR) auctions them as scrap when they are certified as unserviceable.

If you are a homeless person living in Telangana, you could get the chance to live in one of these coaches. As part of the Telangana Mission for Elimination of Poverty in Municipal Areas (TMEPMA), the state government has asked 16 urban local bodies if they would like to house the homeless in old railway coaches. 

Twenty-one new shelters are to come up in and around Hyderabad and one way of setting them up would be to use train bogies as shelters. They would, of course, be provided sanitation, electricity connections and water. This proposal is part of the Deendayal Upadhyaya Antyodaya Yojana-National Urban Livelihoods Mission and will be funded by it. The rail coaches to be used are those which are the casualty of ongoing gauge conversion by the railways and have to be mothballed.

But scrap is not always scrap. 

In 2003, Tarun Thakral, then general manager of the Le Meridien Hotel in Delhi (now its chief executive officer), read that IR was proposing to sell as scrap a railway carriage. Then lodged in the Ajmer Carriage Workshop, the “scrap” turned out to be a saloon originally built for the Maharajah of Jodhpur, later used by the Bombay Baroda and Central India Railway to transport erstwhile royalty and VIPs. It was no longer serviceable because it could only run on meter gauge. While the outer body was iron, the entire inner body was made of Burma teak. The railways would have cannibalised it, torn off the wood from the iron and sold it to separate scrap dealers.

The saloon was 75 feet long and weighed over 30 tons. It was configured for meter gauge. In its original configuration it comprised a living room, two bedrooms, a toilet and a kitchen. Thakral, a lifelong collector of antiques (things that others called kabaadi or junk) knew he had to have it.

There were problems. IR would not sell to individuals — not even scrap. Thakral’s request — that he be treated as a scrap dealer and the entire coach be sold to him instead of being torn down, because the coach represented valuable heritage of the country — had to be referred to the Railway Board. Permissions and clearances took 18 months. Finally, at a considerable personal cost, Thakral paid the Government of India a few lakh rupees and became the owner of a railway coach. Thankfully, the episode galvanised the government to draw up a policy on what could be sold as scrap and what was heritage.

The problem was transporting it from its site to his farmhouse. It took a couple of heavy lift cranes to shift it. The saloon, restored painstakingly, is now in a museum that Thakral has established for vintage cars and other transport. The Heritage Transport Museum in Tauru near Delhi, is not a place for the homeless — but houses things that are useless — at the same time, so precious that no value can be put to them.