ONE
A RAILWAY FOR INDIA
THE BRITISH NEVER really conquered India. But the railways did. Remarkably, the British takeover of India was a commercial operation, carried out by the East India Company in conjunction, at various times, with the British government and its army.
The East India Company first arrived in India as early as 1600 but was for much of its first century what it said on the tin, a trading company interested in profit principally from cloth and spices, and later in a wider variety of produce such as silk, tea and opium. Gradually, though, the Company became something more: an overt weapon of imperialism. By the mid-eighteenth century, ‘company’ troops were fighting the French for control of India and over the next decades, through a mixture of treaties with local maharajahs and wars against both local and European opponents, the Company ruled over large swathes of its territory. There were, however, still large chunks, such as Hyderabad and parts of the vast Deccan plain, that were under the control of local maharajahs, and Portugal and France still had coastal interests.
By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, while railways were being built in many countries across the world, the East India Company was in full control of the subcontinent but was not particularly keen to join the party. After the almost simultaneous opening in 1830 of the world’s first major railways in England and in the USA, a few progressive Indian business people had suggested creating a network in India. There were a couple of local initiatives that are sometimes claimed to be the first lines in India, but they were in reality more akin to the wagon ways that had long existed in the UK to transport minerals from mines to the nearest waterway than fully fledged railways. In 1836, work started on a short line near Madras at Chintadripet to transport granite for roadbuilding, and it opened, as the five-mile-long Red Hill Rail Road, the following year. Although the traction was mostly provided by animals hauling the wagons and, on the return trip of the empties, by a combination of gravity and a sail, one or possibly two or three very crude ‘rotary’ steam locomotives were apparently deployed for a while, but details, as with all these early schemes, remain sketchy. The promoter, Captain Arthur Cotton, sought to be allowed to carry passengers on the line but was refused permission by the Madras authorities. However, there is a report that on one journey, in August 1838, twenty-one passengers in four carriages were hauled by one of these locomotives, thus, if true, preceding by fifteen years the opening of the Bombay–Thana line, the usual date given by historians as the subcontinent’s inaugural passenger journey.
There were other early initiatives, such as a line on a dam project at Rajamundry in Andhra Pradesh, where wagons were hauled by men on tracks, greatly helping the movement of heavy stone. A few years later, an extensive network, stretching more than ten miles, was created to assist the construction of the Solani aqueduct in Uttaranchal in northern India. That line also appears to have seen the first extensive use of a steam locomotive in India, a large six-wheeled standard-gauge engine imported from Leeds. Assembled in situ from parts sent from Britain and carried overland to the site, it was named Thomason in honour of the lieutenant-governor of the North-Western Provinces and was reckoned to be able to haul 200 tons at a speed of 4 mph. There are doubts over its fate and even its precise manufacture, but the generally accepted version is that, after only nine months in service, ‘it disintegrated in a boiler explosion’, which, apparently, was ‘to the delight of the construction workers who had viewed it more as a hindrance than a help’.1
However, none of these early uses of railway technology had any long-term significance in terms of the development of the subcontinent’s rail network. Nor did the odd attempt by Indians to push for the construction of railways, such as the suggestion, in 1844, of a Bengali merchant, Dwarkanath Tagore, who offered to fund a third of the capital of a line linking Calcutta north-west to the Burdwan coalfields. There were other expressions of interest by Indian industrialists, but nothing came of any of these schemes.
It was pressure from merchants in Britain that persuaded the British government to consider the introduction of railways in India. The Governor-General of India from 1844 to 1848, Lord Hardinge, who in effect ruled the nation, suggested that the East India Company should support initiatives by railway promoters to build an east–west line across India. He was clear about the compelling reasons for wanting to see the line built as, in his opinion, ‘on military considerations alone, the grant of one million sterling … may be contributed to the great line when completed from Calcutta to Delhi, and a pecuniary saving be effected by a diminution of military establishments’.2 Hardinge’s argument that facilitating rapid transport between major cities would permit a reduction in the number of troops required to be kept in barracks was the first articulation of a line of thinking that would play a key role in the early history of India’s rail network. Supporting the ability of the military to remain in control of the country was always a useful extra line of reasoning to deploy in favour of the railways and, indeed, this military rationale was to play a key role in the development of Indian railways. The military imperative was not, however, the initial stimulus for the railways’ introduction, nor a major component of their ultimate raison d’être.
The East India Company, whose power was beginning to wane in the face of a more detailed oversight of the subcontinent by the British government, was initially opposed to the building of railways. Its board, known as the Court of Directors, set out a series of reasons why railways and India were not compatible in a letter to the Governor-General. It was a comprehensive list which included weather-related phenomena such as the ‘periodical rains and inundations’ and ‘violent winds’, the hostile nature of the flora and fauna, the fact that it would be impossible to fence in the railway and the difficulty in attracting ‘competent contractors and trustworthy engineers’. The killer point seemed to be, in the eyes of the London-based board, the effect of the ‘vertical sun’, though they did not explain precisely what they meant by that.3 In reality it was a bureaucratic response designed to avoid doing something in the face of pressure from the government. One key aspect of disagreement was that the government realized the promoters would require a guarantee on their rate of return, an inducement the East India Company vehemently opposed.
The Company’s resistance proved to be to no avail. The forces pushing for the railways were far greater than those arraigned against them. The key supporters included the powerful textile manufacturers, who were anxious to source cotton in India and sell the finished product to its people. Alongside them were the shipping interests, who were not only keen to carry the increased trade between the two nations that would result from the development of a rail network, but also, specifically, to supply their relatively new steamships with coal from the mines of western Bengal, which could be brought to the port of Calcutta by rail, allowing them to refuel on the way to points further east. The vision outlined by the supporters and railway promoters was indeed alluring, holding out ‘the prospect of vast and opulent India becoming, once opened up by railways, a fabulous supply house of cotton and wheat and a huge consumer of textile and other manufactured products of Britain’.4 This powerful combination of business interests held much influence in the British parliament and ultimately forced the East India Company begrudgingly to accept the inevitability of railways coming to India.
However, the initial plan for the railways seemed to take into account the Company’s misgivings by covering only two sections of line, totalling a mere 142 miles. The idea was that the two lines would be ‘experimental’ because of the doubts over the viability of railways in India, and, therefore, if they failed or proved technically impossible, the plan could be discontinued without substantial investment. This was pretty timid stuff since by the time the go-ahead was given in 1849, the railway age across the world was in full swing, with most major countries having developed networks and the UK already boasting a system that would soon top 5,000 miles. Modest as it was, the scheme would still ensure India would be a pioneer, by building the first system in Asia.
The primitive nature of India’s transport network was another factor that made railways attractive. There was a system of crude roads, but travel on them was notoriously slow, especially as oxen and buffalo, far more suited to the climate than horses, were used to haul the carts that carried both people and agricultural produce. There was one exception, which interestingly later led to an experiment in running steam trains on roads rather than rails. This was the Grand Trunk Road, which opened in 1839 between Calcutta and Delhi, and was extended to Peshawar (now in Pakistan) twenty years later. For its time, it was a very good, well-surfaced and wide road, so much so that in the early 1870s a mechanically minded army officer, Rookes Crompton (who later founded the Crompton company, which made light bulbs), decided to try to run steam vehicles along it. Crompton, stationed at Nowshera on the Grand Trunk Road near Peshawar, brought over steam engines from Edinburgh to run on the road in an effort to speed up transport. Bullock carts travelled at the glacial pace of only 2 mph, slower than walking pace, and the army feared this was not fast enough for troops. The high standard of the trunk road and the sluggishness of the carts persuaded the Governor-General, Lord Mayo, to fund the experiment. With the first engine, The Primer, Crompton embarked on a journey of thirty miles from Umballa to Kalka in the Punjab but encountered various difficulties, such as the vehicles being too heavy for the bridges and the shortage of coal (wood provided insufficient power). He persevered with two other engines which he had tested back in the UK, but again technical problems with crankshafts and the high cost of the solid rubber tyres led to the abandonment of the scheme, though Crompton claimed that the ‘train’ could haul nineteen vehicles and a load of forty tons, and climb up to as much as a 1 in 18 gradient at speeds of 5 mph or more. It was, though, never going to be reliable enough, and, instead, a rail line was soon built connecting Umballa and Kalka with Delhi.
Interestingly, similar experiments had taken place in the UK and France before the railways won out, as they did in India. However, it was inconceivable that the road network could be the solution to nineteenth-century India’s transport needs. Much of the network was far older than the Grand Trunk Road, having been built under the Mughal Empire, and it had fallen into neglect after its collapse in the late eighteenth century. The terrible condition of the roads was a catalyst for the development of the railways, both for commercial and for military purposes.
The lack of cheap transport made the export of many commodities uneconomic as the costs were too high in relation to their value and there was considerable spoilage, given the crude nature of the carts. There were the odd exceptions, such as Bengali rice, which could be exported thanks to cheap river transport. Indian cloth, a product expensive enough to be transported over long distances, was also sold extensively abroad (until the British imposed tariffs to protect its mills). However, for the most part, the absence of cheap and reliable transport meant that many regions were effectively cut off and unable to trade, greatly limiting the size of potential markets and consequently restricting the potential economic development of the subcontinent.
It is easy to be cynical about the altruistic reasons often cited at the time for the encouragement of railways in India, but selflessness was a genuine force in Victorian administration. Many supporters of the iron road saw the railways as a civilizing influence, one that would, to put it bluntly, make India a bit more like us. These arguments cannot simply be dismissed as merely masking imperialism under a cloak of altruism, since the case for railways was made by numerous prominent Victorians and accorded with their wider view of Britain’s role in the world. Lord Dalhousie, who succeeded Hardinge as Governor-General, himself put it succinctly: ‘They [the railways] will lead to some similar progress in social improvement that has marked the introduction of improved communication in various Kingdoms of the Western World.’5 Or as, twenty years later, Grant Duff, an official in the India Office during Gladstone’s government, argued: ‘If we are not in India to civilize and raise India, we had better leave it as soon as we can and wind up our affairs.’6
The railways also had a great champion who was to be crucial to their introduction. In the history of railway development in every country of the world, there is invariably a pioneering figure who can be characterized as the father of the railways (they are all men). In the case of India, it is undoubtedly Lord Dalhousie who merits this title. He took over as Governor-General in 1848 and was, according to the historian John Keay, ‘a modernising and imperious workaholic’7 who routinely worked sixteen- or even eighteen-hour days. He was a firm advocate of Britain’s imperial role, believing that extending it wherever possible would be good for India. During his eight-year tenure, several princely states were taken under Britain’s wing thanks to his clever policy of assuming control over any state where a ruler had died without having a son who could inherit the title. Dalhousie had already been involved in the railway industry back in the UK as President of the Board of Trade – the ministry responsible at the time for the railways – in Robert Peel’s government during the collapse of the railway mania in 1845. Dalhousie’s voracious appetite for work was not wasted, and he was one of those politicians who could master both the big picture and the smallest detail. When he accepted the role of Governor-General of India, he made it clear that he alone would determine policy in the subcontinent, independent of party politics back home, and consequently much of the shape, policies and practices of Indian railways today are a result of the ideas he set out in two renowned ‘minutes’ written in 1850 and 1853 respectively to the East India Company’s Court of Directors.
These are extraordinary and extensive documents, written personally in long hand with the second one running to 216 pages and penned with an eye to future historians. Dalhousie did what the British government had never done at home and planned a network of railways, setting out in some detail the order in which they should be built. He cited political and commercial reasons for their construction, and dismissed the long list of objections cited by the Court. There were no insuperable engineering problems, he argued, though he accepted the main difficulty was the fording of India’s vast rivers. He did not attempt to disguise the fact that there were good commercial reasons for the establishment of railways, which would open up coalfields and other sources of minerals for exploitation. Dalhousie pointed out how much time would be saved if there were a line linking Calcutta with Bombay, obviating the need for the long sea voyage through the Palk strait between Ceylon and India. Since his relentless expansion of British control over India necessitated the occasional war, Dalhousie did not omit the military imperative, repeating the notion that the railways would ensure the security of British rule more cheaply. In sum, railways ‘would encourage enterprise, multiply production, facilitate the discovery of latent resources, increase national wealth and encourage “progress in social improvement”’.8
What was there not to like? Well, there was the fact that this was a nakedly imperial project that not only would later attract the wrath of nationalists but which also limited the usefulness of the railways to the country in which they were being built. As Ian J. Kerr, the most productive historian of Indian railways, summed it up, ‘The interests of the Indians were incidental although, as represented in the writings of Dalhousie and many Britons, the progressive consequences for India of the railroads was a self-evident truth.’9 In other words, the benefits of railways for the subcontinent may have been incidental, but they were nevertheless substantial.
There was, however, the issue of how these lines would be built. Already promoters in Britain had created railway companies with the intention of constructing lines in India, and they had put forward numerous competing schemes. It was a cut-throat business, and the various interests were not averse to criticizing each other’s plans, which did little to help the overall cause of the Indian railways, and partly explains why so little progress was made in the 1840s.
The Government of India was in no position to carry out the work itself, and, in any case, such a direct involvement of government went completely against the prevailing UK ideology of the time. The private sector had to be involved, but the way that the railways had developed in Britain, through a system of promoters petitioning Parliament, was clearly unsuitable in the Indian context. There was no question of companies coming forward to suggest where lines were to be constructed. Dalhousie and his successors had drawn lines on the map where they wanted to see routes built and that was how the outline of the system was determined, though they may have been influenced, at times, by earlier maps put forward by private interests.
However, attracting private companies to what was, as the Court of Directors had intimated, a pretty risky enterprise, required a substantial inducement. While direct subsidy was out of the question in Victorian Britain, it was clear that no railways would be built unless the private companies were given a deal that satisfied their investors. For much of the 1840s, negotiations between government and the private companies were stuck over the precise financial arrangements and the degree of risk that the investors would have to bear. The only way of breaking the deadlock was for the government to provide a guaranteed rate of return. The government had initially sought to limit the level to 3 per cent but the companies held out for more, and the eventual figure agreed in March 1849 was 5 per cent, a very healthy level at a time when interest rates were 3 per cent, and consequently the arrangement guaranteed sufficient investment funds would become available.
This generosity on the part of the British government was not all it seemed. While the investment funds would come almost entirely from Britain, the risk was borne by Indian, not British, taxpayers, who would be required to meet any shortfall between the rate of profit from operating the railways and the 5 per cent guarantee. While there is disagreement over how much this would eventually cost the Indian people, Ian J. Kerr reckons ‘the revenues of the Government of India were tapped for some £50 million to meet the guarantee’.10 Moreover, the railways, or rather the railway companies, enjoyed other benefits too, such as not having to pay for the land or for the legal costs of acquiring it, something that proved a heavy burden for British railway companies. The guarantee ensured that British investors came forward in large numbers. These were not capitalists in search of a quick buck but, rather, ordinary people with a bit of money to set aside and earn a steady rate of return. According to one researcher, ‘the middle classes predominated – widows, barristers, clergymen, spinsters, bankers and retired army officers’.11 Both sides were happy. The railway companies got their funding at relatively low rates of interest, while the British bourgeoisie found a safe place for their money.
Dalhousie set out the plans in great detail, even ruling on the question of gauge, the distance between the two rails. At the time, across the world, there was no consensus on what this should be. The size varied between 7ft 0¼in and 3ft 3⅜in (or, rather, metre gauge), with many variants in between. Indeed, there were several countries where no common gauge had emerged triumphant and in Britain itself railways were being built with two very different gauges: the 7ft 0¼in favoured by Brunel’s Great Western Railway, and 4ft 8½in that prevailed elsewhere. Indeed, the latter was already becoming known as ‘standard gauge’ for it was widely used in Europe – though with exceptions such as Spain and Russia – and was becoming dominant in the USA.
The promoters of Indian lines had pressed for standard gauge and that was the basis of the initial agreement between the government and the companies signed in 1849. However, Dalhousie favoured a 6ft gauge, feeling that the particular conditions of India, with its mountainous terrain requiring steep gradients and its high winds, needed the stability of a wider gauge. After much debate, a compromise was reached in London with the adoption of a 5ft 6in gauge, and later many lines in remote or mountainous parts of India used metre gauge (3ft 3⅜in). In a far-sighted move, which was to make increasing the capacity of the system much easier in later years, the major trunk network was built to specifications for double tracks, with wider and stronger bridges, even when initially only a single track was laid.
Dalhousie’s second minute set out in precise detail the routes of the initial trunk network. He based his selection on three criteria: the political and commercial advantages of the routes, the ease of construction in the face of engineering challenges, and their potential as a main line connecting various branches. His plan envisaged connecting the principal cities and extending across most of the subcontinent. There was to be a 1,500-mile line across the top of India from Calcutta along the Ganges valley to Allahabad and then to Delhi, through the Punjab to Lahore (in what is now Pakistan). Two lines would stretch out of Bombay, one linking up with the Calcutta–Delhi line, the other eastwards to Poona and onwards. Madras, too, would have a couple of lines stretching out from it, and, of course, the idea was that all routes should be connected at a later stage. All of these lines would eventually be built.
By the time Dalhousie’s second minute was despatched in April 1853, work had already started on the first two ‘experimental’ lines. They were a rather random choice: a short 21-mile-long suburban line stretching from the centre of Bombay to Thana, and a 100-mile-long main line from Howrah, the other side of the Hooghly River from Calcutta, since the crossing was initially deemed to be too difficult and expensive. It was intended to reach Burdwan in order to transport the coal from the Raniganj coalfields through to the port of Calcutta. While deemed experimental, there was little doubt that these two railways would be the forerunners of what was to become a major national network as set out by Dalhousie.
The promoter of the Bombay line was the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, whose grand name rather contrasted with the modest nature of its inaugural railway. The company, formed in London in 1843, had long focused on linking Bombay with its outlying districts as its principal investors included a strong cohort of Liverpool cotton manufacturers who were keen to find new sources of raw materials. It was their involvement which proved to be decisive in establishing that the first line should run from Bombay into its hinterland, where the cotton grew. Despite its large production of cotton, India exported very little because of the poor internal transport system dominated by bullock carts, which were unreliable, particularly at times of drought and famine, resulting in ships often being kept waiting at ports for produce that never arrived. A promotional pamphlet published by the British cotton merchants, Railways for Bombay, argued that the Americans, who were flooding the British market with their cotton, did so thanks to their extensive railway network. Creating a rail network in India would not only solve the problem of internal transport but also free the British market of dependence on the potentially unreliable supply from America.
The initial protagonist for the Great Indian Peninsula Railway was one of those amateur enthusiasts who litter the history of early railways. John Chapman was a carriage manufacturer who had rather grander ideas about designing a flying machine, but soon gave up on the plan. He had been a successful manufacturer of knitting machinery for export to the Continent until he ran afoul of British export controls designed to limit foreign acquisition of machinery that could threaten the domestic industry. He was a kind of James Dyson of his time and was to play a key role in turning the dream of Indian railways into reality. Chapman wrote a pamphlet on the need for better transport for cotton and brought together a group of promoters to create the Great Indian Peninsula Railway company. He was motivated enough to take himself to Bombay to undertake a survey of potential routes, but initially chose an alignment that involved passing through already populated areas. As Rajendra Aklekar puts it, ‘The plan would have changed the Bombay we know today, if the arrangement had worked.’12 Instead, the route from Bombay to Thana, a significant town described by Marco Polo, who visited in 1290, as a ‘great kingdom’ with a substantial port, was selected and incorporated into legislation passed in the British Parliament.
Once the agreement between the government and the companies over the guaranteed rate of return had been made, the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, keen to get started, appointed James Berkley as ‘chief resident engineer’, and despatched him to Bombay. He was widely recommended, especially by Robert Stephenson, who had built the London & Birmingham Railway and had appointed Berkley as engineer on a couple of railways in the Midlands. On Berkley’s arrival in February 1850, he wasted no time in rolling up his sleeves, and work started on the line between Bombay and Thana at the end of October that year, with a British contractor, Faviell & Fowler, in charge. The Bombay terminus was to be at Bori Bunder, the site today of India’s grandest railway station, Victoria Terminus (now officially known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, although Bombay residents, especially taxi drivers, still call it ‘VT’).
The scale of the enterprise, even for such a relatively short line, can be judged by the fact that Faviell & Fowler took on nearly 10,000 workers to undertake the task. And, inevitably, the cultural differences that were to dog much railway construction on the subcontinent appeared almost immediately. As Aklekar puts it in his history of the line, this first engagement between British rail engineers and ‘native’ workers ‘led to a giant clash of cultures, with British engineers trying to extract their money’s worth, and the workers, in truth, demanding respect for their ways and religious practices’.13 One of the firm’s partners, Henry Fowler, complained in a letter to England about how difficult it was to persuade the workers to start work at six in the morning rather than the customary eight: ‘It is the most difficult thing to alter the existing system as almost every custom the natives have is founded on absurd but invincible prejudices – generally of religious character.’14
Just to complicate matters further for the British contractors, there were the multifarious divisions and sub-divisions into castes whose members refused to work with those of another caste and at times even tried to prevent others from working at all. Fowler was to learn the hard way that Europeans (the word ‘European’ was used widely and was effectively synonymous with ‘British’ or ‘white’) were pariahs. He wrote how one particularly hot day on site he made the mistake of grabbing a worker’s water pot only to see ‘the innocent vessel … immediately doomed to destruction as the fact of my touching it had defiled it’.15 Such incidents could lead to walkouts by groups of men, angered at a slight or by an insensitive overseer. Poor Fowler never acclimatized to India and illness soon forced him back to the UK, where he died in 1854 at the tender age of just thirty-four, leaving the hardier Faviell in sole charge.
The difficulties Faviell faced were unprecedented and he had to learn on the job while in the full glare of the curiosity of local people and the attention of the British rulers. He had tried to recruit British labour, but the men failed to adapt either to the climate or to the culture, and, with only meagre wages on offer, the lucky ones who did not succumb to illness soon returned home. Native labour was cheap and abundant, except during the rice harvest, when many workers returned to their smallholdings, thereby creating a temporary shortage.
The contractors were under pressure to keep costs down. The East India Company remained sceptical of the advantages of the railway and had watched developments in the UK, where many schemes foundered with investors losing their money, with horror. Before work started, they had warned the Government of India to watch the pennies and drew its attention to a ‘great error committed by Railway Companies in Europe in the hope that you will studiously avoid a similar error’, which was that ‘large sums of money … have been most unnecessarily and extravagantly expended in ornamental works, especially those connected with the stations and offices of the Company’.16
There were other novel challenges such as the local wildlife, particularly snakes, with at least two local species capable of delivering fatal bites. The greatest difficulty, however, was the topography of the route. By a strange coincidence, the first line crossed between two islands through the same type of wetland that Britain’s first major railway, the Liverpool & Manchester, had encountered more than twenty years previously in the swamps of Chat Moss. George Stephenson, the pioneering engineer of that inaugural line, had developed a radical solution to the problem by creating a kind of ‘floating embankment’ on a bed of plants, faggots of wood, rubble and tar. This time, it was his son, Robert, who, as consulting engineer to the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, devised a similarly ingenious solution. As Aklekar reports, ‘mattresses were made from mangrove trees and spread across the mud, then soil was placed on top to press the mattress; another mattress was superimposed and more soil placed until a sturdy bed emerged, sufficient for solid road and tracks.’17 Another technological challenge was getting the gauge right. Curves pose particular challenges for railway builders and ensuring the workers used the right equipment to maintain the 5ft 6in separation was no easy task, and in the early days after opening there were numerous train derailments as a result.
Beyond the swamps, the railway crossed open countryside with attractive views of the Thana River and the Ghats (the mountains that would, as outlined in the next chapter, be a major obstacle to extensions of the line). Despite the difficulties created by both the topography and the weather, progress was steady and, by mid-1852, a mere two years from the start of work, part of the line was opened for the use of construction traffic. The big technical challenge was, of course, finding suitable locomotives to power the trains. In this respect, India, by starting to build railways rather late in relation to many other nations, could take advantage of technological developments in locomotive design, which had proceeded rapidly in the two decades since the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester line.
One of the key innovations of the Liverpool & Manchester which marked it out as the world’s first modern railway was that it was powered entirely by steam engines. There had been some debate in India, prior to the creation of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, on whether horses should be used to haul the trains. In fact, a man called Clark had promoted an idea for a railway on a similar alignment to Thana that would have used steam locomotives for passenger trains and horses for goods traffic. Interestingly, he calculated that while this would only have required ten locomotives for passengers, 334 horses would be needed to haul the goods wagons, which suggests that it was simple economics that dictated the use of steam engines as much as speed and practicality.
The first locomotive for the Thana line, built by the foundry of E. B. Wilson in Leeds, arrived with much fanfare. In one of those complications that so often feature in history, as mentioned above, it was not actually the first steam locomotive to run in India, but its predecessor had made little impact and had long been forgotten. The momentous nature of the locomotive’s arrival was demonstrated by the huge attention it attracted when, after being craned off the ship, it was pulled along roads filled with thousands of sightseers by a couple of hundred men drafted in for the task. Its initial home was Byculla, in what is now south Mumbai, where a shunting yard had been created for the steam engines. Officially named Lord Falkland after the Bombay governor of the time, the engine undertook its initial test shunting runs, watched by crowds of curious onlookers, which triggered debates in the local newspapers on what to call this extraordinary invention that was captivating – and at times scaring – the local population. There were suggestions that it should be called ‘Ag-boat’, the name given to steam vessels that had started becoming a regular sight at the port of Bombay, but this was rejected in favour of ‘fire chariot’, a far better description.
Test runs began in February 1852 and not surprisingly caused something of, as Aklekar puts it, ‘a cultural shock’. There had been much speculation in Britain when the railways appeared about the damage that could be done to farm animals – they would be turned black – or to people – who would not be able to breathe because of the speed – and it was only familiarity which eventually allayed these fears. In India, which, unlike the UK, did not have the factories and chimney stacks that had sprung up during the Industrial Revolution, the surprise at seeing this behemoth in action was far greater and led to much wilder speculation about the functioning of the engine. For some, it was seen as an ungodly, even evil, invention that earned it the name of ‘iron demon’ (‘lokhandi rakshash’ in Marathi). The engine appeared to be driven by magical powers, and there was widespread and understandable incomprehension that it could move so fast without any obvious power source. The most potentially damaging rumour was that the authorities ‘had to bury children and young couples under the rail sleepers to “power” the rail engine; British sepoys [soldiers], therefore, were perpetually looking for and catching hold of young couples and children on the streets’18 to provide the sustenance for the engines. There were warnings, too, that those foolhardy enough to travel on the railway would find their lifespan dramatically decreased since, as Aklekar explains, ‘if one reached one’s destination so much faster, one was bound to speed up life and age’.19
There were numerous test runs before the official opening of the line, which helped to allay these fears and make the new technology more familiar to local people. The line was completed on time and, miraculously, under budget. The opening on 16 April 1853 was seen as an event of national, indeed international, significance. The 400 invited guests, who included royalty as well as rich local merchants and ‘zamindars’ (landowners), were treated to a rapid ride down the twenty-one-mile line from Bori Bunder to Thana, hauled by three locomotives alliteratively called (according to legend but not officially recorded) Sindh, Sultan and Sahib, all from the Vulcan Foundry in Newton-le-Willows near Liverpool, in which Robert Stephenson was a partner. The guests travelled in fourteen fairly primitive carriages that had just four wheels each – making for a bumpy ride – and which had also been shipped from England, but there were no mishaps. All those test runs had proved their worth. There was, though, a notable absentee. Lord Falkland, the governor of Bombay, did not turn up to the ceremony, preferring to remain in the cool of the local hill station, despite the fact that the inaugural locomotive had been named after him. Perhaps he was peeved that it was not on duty on that historic day.
Along the track, every vantage point on rooftops and hillocks was taken and some of the locals, according to the Overland Telegraph and Courier, reported that ‘the natives salaamed [bowed to] the omnipotence of the steam engine as it passed’.20 Others saw the engine as a god and applied the tilak, the red mark of the Hindus, to the smoke stacks of the locomotives, left food and money on the footplate, and laid flowers on the tracks.
It was not only locals who turned out to watch. The Illustrated London News, which reported on what it saw correctly as an event that ‘would be remembered far longer than the recent battles which had brought India into the British Empire’,21 found there were visitors from as far afield as East Africa, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. It was, in other words, recognized as a world-changing event. Even with a stop halfway for the engines to fill their water tanks, it took less than an hour for the pioneering train to cover the route, despite the fact that sightseers slowed its progress by spilling on to the tracks, a phenomenon that survives to this day (and, shockingly, currently causes ten deaths per day in the Bombay area alone).
The blessings must have proved effective. Passengers flocked to the line, with more than 4,000 per day travelling on the railway by the end of the year (today it carries that number on just one of its overcrowded trains). Not everyone, of course, welcomed its arrival. As ever with a new invention, there were losers. The most obvious were the bullock cart owners, who, at risk of losing both their passenger and freight business, picked a fight with the railway and launched a price war. They started charging a fixed rate from the agricultural areas to Bombay, rather than setting a cheaper fare for the shorter ride to the railhead, and, for a while, their clever manoeuvre took considerable business away from the railway. Eventually, however, as the new line expanded further into the hinterland, the advantages of rail travel proved decisive in winning over traffic. As Aklekar puts it, ‘as the benefits of easy, clean and swift transport became obvious, both rumours and objections vanished’.
The Bombay Quarterly Review was contemptuous of the doubts widely expressed during the construction period on whether ‘natives’ would use the railway and about predictions that the trains would run empty: ‘So erroneous were the prognostications of the failure of passenger traffic, that the natives, down even to the lowest orders, immediately availed themselves of the new mode of conveyance.’ The journal went on to recount that ‘a poor, ragged, companionless girl, and ticket in hand … [took] her place in a third class carriage with all the independence of a commercial traveller’.22
The fares had been set reasonably cheap, ranging from 4 rupees 4 annas for first class to 8 annas 6 pies for third class (or just 3 pies per mile) for the thirty-three-mile journey from Bori Bunder to Kalyan. The line had been extended to Kalyan, a further twelve miles, in 1854, and with every new addition there were the inevitable celebrations: ‘Each official opening was marked by an appropriate ceremony with various festivities, banquets, speeches and toasts, plus the necessary train ride in the foreshadowing of a ritual that was to be repeated throughout the century in various parts of India as more and more lines opened, great bridges completed, long tunnels excavated or precipitous inclines surmounted.’23 These events played a crucial role in encouraging local people to appreciate the railway, and the provision of a free inaugural ride for the local dignitaries was a clever way of winning the influential elite over to the ‘fire chariot’.
The much grander line of the East Indian Railway Company stretching east from Howrah should have been the first to operate in India, given it was perceived at the time as being of far greater importance than its suburban counterpart in Bombay (which today, of course, carries hundreds of millions of people annually). However, the Great Indian Peninsula Railway had been much cannier than its counterpart in the east at winning over local opinion by holding a series of public meetings to raise interest and reduce antagonism towards the messy construction process. By contrast, opposition to the East India’s project had delayed the start of work, and a series of quite bizarre and unlikely mishaps caused further setbacks.
The East Indian Railway had its origins in the visit to India of its founder, Macdonald Stephenson, who in the early 1840s travelled with three assistants from London to survey the route of a potential railway from Calcutta, then the capital of India, to Delhi via Mirzapur. He returned home to form the company, having drawn up an outline route to attract investors. The East Indian Railway won the right to build the second of Dalhousie’s two experimental lines, a 121-mile track in West Bengal between Howrah and Burdwan, which would be the start of the branch to the large Raniganj coalfields that would provide much of the income for the railway. As with the Great Indian Peninsula, investors in the East Indian were guaranteed the generous 5 per cent rate of return, which would be paid by the Government of India if revenues were insufficient.
Work started in January 1851 and although, in general, the terrain was easier than that encountered on the Thana route, the difficulties were more typical of those that would be encountered by other railways in India. The decision to start on the western side of the Hooghly River was a recognition that India’s vast rivers, which flowed rapidly at monsoon time – or, for those in the north, during the snow melt – but were mere trickles the rest of the time, posed a major obstacle for the railways. The rivers have notoriously wide flood plains to accommodate the exceptional storm water of the rainy season, which means the bridges fording them must not only be very long, but also built with piers to withstand the brief period when they are raging torrents, full of debris and running fast enough to scour out even quite substantial foundations. There were, as we see in the next chapter, several mishaps resulting from a failure to understand this fundamental requirement. The rivers, too, had the mischievous habit of altering their course from year to year, with the result that ‘more than once, engineers have discovered that the river has shifted before their bridge is finished’.24 The rivers caused all sorts of difficulties and required not only bridges but numerous culverts, revetments and embankments. In terms of topography, however, the East Indian had it easy because the land was flat, as demonstrated by the fact that even after it had extended through to Delhi, there was only one tunnel on its 1,340 miles of track, which was just a modest 300 yards long.
Various other difficulties beset the East Indian Railway, leading to delays in the full opening of the line. First, a dispute with Chandernagar, a territory still governed by the French on the route of the railway, had to be resolved. Then in one of the great classic errors of early railway history, the cause of much mirth, the locomotive intended to haul the first train was taken to Australia due, apparently, to a clerical error. To compound the railway’s problems, the coaches suffered an even worse fate as the ship carrying them from England sank on the voyage. Their replacements were Indian built, the first produced on the subcontinent, but sadly were not to be the genesis of a domestic industry, as for the next century rolling stock and locomotives came predominantly from the UK. If it had not been for the twin mishaps suffered by the rolling stock intended for Howrah, the inaugural service would have been on the East Indian Railway, which was, after all, a far more significant line than the suburban route served by the Great Indian Peninsula Railway.
The line was opened in stages which ensured an immediate stream of revenue for the railway company. On 15 August 1854, sixteen months after the opening of the Thana line, the first train ran on the twenty-three-mile section, between Howrah and the town of Hooghly. As with its predecessor, it was an instant success and it took under four months for the total passenger numbers carried to reach 100,000, with standing quickly becoming the norm in third class. Over the next few months the whole 121-mile section was opened.
The pretence that this was an experimental line was soon forgotten and the contract for expansion of the line to Delhi, which had always been Dalhousie’s plan, was already signed a few weeks before the first train ran from Howrah. There was now nothing to stop the iron horse or, rather, the fire chariot, from conquering India.