Indian Railways celebrated a landmark event this week. After two years of trials, the much bally-hooed Gatimaan Express went from Hazrat Nizamuddin to Agra in 100 minutes flat. That is five whole minutes less than what the first Shatabdi Express on the same stretch took some 17 years ago! The Railways also replaced coach attendants with fancier-sounding rail hosts and hostesses and varied catering. But graciousness doesn't quite go with rail travel these days.
That was not always so. Back when journeys were experiences to savour rather than fastest transit between two points, Railways offered elegance in elite trains. The Deccan Queen between Bombay and Poona (old place names with their original spellings rule this nostalgia) was clearly the presiding majesty. Two sets of three semi-articulated first class wood-panelled coaches with a restaurant car in between that could rival the one in Spectre comprised the train. A gleaming all-black remarkably compact electric loco, often the 4001 Sir Roger Lumley (named after a former governor of the Bombay presidency), now in retirement at the Safdarjung museum, hauled it. The 119-mile journey took two-and-a-half hours, no speed record, but better than the three-and-a-quarter hours the present Queen takes when on schedule, which is seldom. The restaurant car served full English teas on the way to Poona and breakfast on return, with bone china, cut-glass and sterling silver accoutrements.
Other prestigious trains also boasted of fine dining in similar restaurant cars - the Frontier Mail from Bombay to Peshawar (later Amritsar), the Bombay-Calcutta Mails via Nagpur and Allahabad, the Kalka Mail, and of course, the Calcutta-Dhanbad Black Diamond Express and the Calcutta-Tatanagar Steel Express. Dining cars and buffet cars graced lesser trains, and pantry cars the lowliest of all! The food, fittings and service were all similarly graded, but far superior to what obtains now.
If the old Deccan Queen was the grand dame, the present one is a bag lady. Crowded, poorly maintained AC and second class chair cars now ferry tired commuters. The pantry car is cluttered with spilled stocks and last cleaned goodness knows when. Waiters in stained uniforms serve greasy snacks wrapped in paper plates, promptly disposed off by the trackside.
Conditions are not much better on premium services either. The most prestigious Mumbai Rajdhani Express had good food and service at least in First Class AC. The new coaches carry 24 passengers instead of 16. Gone are glass tumblers and linen napkins, replaced by paper cups and serviettes. The delectable fish fry served as an appetiser is now replaced by two tiny potato tikkis, and the generous plateful of cassata ice cream by a measly 90-ml cup of plain vanilla. What comes in between never varies or tempts the saliva glands. The less said about other trains, including the Rajdhanis and the Shatabdis, the better.
The rail journey that I will forever cherish was on the old-metre gauge Poona-Bangalore Mail between Hubli and Poona. It took a stately 15 hours to traverse the 350 miles, but I didn't ever wish it to be faster. A Pacific YC class steam engine powered the train. The old Madras and Southern Maratha (later Southern) Railway had 15 of these beauties specially designed to negotiate long stretches of 1 in 100 gradients on the section. The stretch between Dharwar and Belgaum was thickly forested, and one could occasionally spot a majestic white-stockinged bison haughtily ignoring the contraption that disturbed his domain. The train clickety-clacked into Londa (from where a branch led to Marmagoa; the old SR sheet time-table listed Marmagoa to Masulipattanam in Andhra as the main east-west line, with two north-south attachments between Poona-Londa and Hubli-Bangalore) early in the evening. It was always drizzly and the buttery smooth idlis and the steaming filter coffee on the platform were to die for. A restaurant car, no less, ran from Belgaum to Miraj, serving dinner in the same aforementioned elegance. I enjoyed that experience in my teens travelling alone, splurging the entire monthly allowance of Rs 10 on it!
At night, at Miraj, a YD class goods loco was attached at the rear as a banker. In the morning, one could look out of the window and see the two engines huffing and puffing through the ghat sections, living up to all our anthropomorphic imaginations. A long crescent separated Salpa and Adarki near Poona and one could see the two stations together.
Well before all this, my father, a very impoverished schoolboy in the early 1900s, used to hang around at Mugad station 12 miles from Dharwar towards Poona, where the two mail trains then crossed. The engine cabs carried the nameplates of their European or Anglo-Indian drivers (specific crews were assigned to the engines. When their shift ended, the engine, too, was replaced). More than a century later, I can vividly picture my father learning many an alien name and its spelling by just watching the hissing engine, waiting for the other train to pass.
All that is gone now, the restaurant cars long since scrapped, metre gauge and steam traction but distant memories and the once-magnificent YCs, when last seen, were pulling an occasional desultory train on some mofussil lines of the decrepit Myanmar Railways. Talk of racehorses past their prime being used as drays!
Will the Gatimaan generation have the luxury of indulging in such sweet nostalgia?
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