THREE
CONTROLLING THE RAILWAYS
WHILE THE GENEROUS arrangements that guaranteed the companies a rate of return may have been necessary to kick-start construction in the early days, they were neither sustainable nor practical in the long term. However, given the imperative to build railways rapidly in response to the Rebellion, the system remained in place for a further decade, by which time the rudiments of the subcontinent’s railway network had been well established.
The fundamental flaw of the system was that there was no incentive for the railways to keep costs down other than through the oversight procedure. After the 1858 Commission into delays in the construction of the railways, procedures became more lax and consequently costs soared. This proved that the guarantee arrangement was inherently problematic. Before 1858, the oversight was too tight and caused delays. After the Commission’s recommendations for a more relaxed system of supervision were accepted, the companies were able to exploit their position to spend without having to worry about the consequences. In effect, they were getting generous rewards without taking any risk.
It was not only the military necessity of creating a national rail network which encouraged the British government and the railway companies to speed up construction. As ever in the history of British colonialism, money was at stake, too. The development of the railways in India was big business for the British – very big business. The sharp rise in the mileage under construction meant the 1860s became boom years for British contractors, builders, engineers, and suppliers of materials and railway equipment. The 200 miles of track laid by 1856 increased twenty-fold by 1870, which made many British railway promoters and contractors both happy and rich.
The early railways were nearly all extensions of lines inland from the three major ports, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. This was partly the result of Dalhousie’s strategy but was also the most practical way of proceeding since the bulk of supplies came by ship from the UK. The economic imperative matched the military one and the railways were to play a vital part in both the Indian and the British economies for the rest of the century. In the 1860s, as a rule of thumb, each mile of railway required one ship arriving from Britain carrying some 600 tons of material. Some of this long-distance transport could have been avoided had there been more focus on local sourcing, which would have been the case had the intention in building railways been to boost the Indian, rather than the British, economy. It was not only, as mentioned in the previous chapter, that there were local supplies of suitable timber for sleepers, but there were also factories in India producing good wrought iron whose output could have been expanded. However, the iron- and steelwork required for bridges, rails and stations represented a major new market for British manufacturers and helped stimulate the economy of the colonial power. The British were not interested in encouraging and developing local industry, which, given the cheapness of rail transport and local labour, would have represented serious competition to their own industries. The few small iron-producing factories were, therefore, not encouraged to increase their output. Free trade had its limits and British interests came first.
The rapid expansion in railway construction provided substantial benefits to the City of London, too, since every journey by ship required insurance, given that losses through sinking were an ever-present risk. The overall effect on Britain’s economy was significant enough to reverse its balance-of-payments deficit, initially through the supply of railway equipment and then through the enhanced opportunities for carrying imports from Britain further into the Indian hinterland that the railways afforded. According to one analysis, ‘Britain kept its overall balance of payments in surplus thanks to its ability to sell large quantities of manufactured goods to India.’1 The theory even goes that the whole economic framework of world trade in the nineteenth century, with the gradual reduction of protectionism and the growth of the free market, may not have been possible had Britain not been able to export so much to India: ‘It appears likely, therefore, that the industrialisation and eventual prosperity of the Western world rested, in part, on Indian Railways.’2 That may be somewhat hyperbolic, but it nevertheless shows the importance accorded to the railways.
The majority of the contractors during this period were British and the people carrying out the most skilled tasks, such as engineers, surveyors and supervisors, were all brought over from Britain. There were big names involved, such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Britain’s most famous (but not always successful) engineer, and John Hawkshaw, the chief engineer of a series of railways in northern England. Both were working with the boards of the British-based railway companies as consultants while remaining in the UK. Others, such as John Brunton, who had worked on the Liverpool & Manchester Railway with the Stephensons, and Joseph Harrison, fresh from building the first railway in Egypt, came to India as the chief engineers on site. The actual work was given to contractors who were in the main British or based in one of the three port cities from where the railways were spreading. The word ‘contractor’ was used rather loosely. Some of the Europeans arriving to seek contracts were little more than financial speculators who would take on work and then pass it on, thereby acting purely as middlemen without investing much, if anything, in equipment or carrying out any work.
There were few local contractors, though one was notably successful: Jamsetji Dorabji, a Parsee (a follower of Zoroastrianism, an ancient religion with its roots in Bombay), won at least five contracts on the Great Indian Peninsula Railway and the Sind, Punjab & Delhi Railway, which he managed to carry out ‘satisfactorily, expeditiously and at less cost than his European competitors’.3 Dorabji had an advantage as the Parsee community was partly Westernized and its members were used to trading with Europeans. Dorabji was an interesting character who had worked in his teenage years as a carpenter in the government dockyard in Bombay, where he started to cultivate friendships with Europeans. Discovering that he had the ability to recruit and use labour, he began to take on small contracts and eventually bid successfully for one on the Great Indian Peninsula Railway. Despite some difficulties with a bridge whose foundations were particularly awkward to lay, he soon earned the accolade of ‘foremost Native Railway Contractor in India’ from James Berkley. While his European rivals complained frequently about the difficulties of recruiting labour, Dorabji was able to earn his workers’ trust and both obtain and retain them, which seems to have been down to his charm and what in modern management speak are called ‘interpersonal skills’. It was the basis of his success. According to his biographer, ‘he was an excellent master to his workmen, not only liberal in wages, but pleasant of speech, and constantly throwing himself into contact with them’.4 Dorabji was also blessed with innate skills, including a prodigious memory – despite, or perhaps because of, being illiterate – and an ability to work out accurate estimates on which to base his tenders, a quality essential for a contractor. He hired competent managers, some European, to work under him and had the benefit of being able to borrow money from the Parsee community, overcoming the problem of most local and European contractors, who were perennially undercapitalized.
The handful of other early Indian contractors proved to be less successful. They had a champion in Sir John Lawrence, the Viceroy for five years from 1864, who, while favouring European contractors with sufficient capital if they were available, recognized that such people were rare and therefore he felt native contractors, who often had experience as sub-contractors, should be granted contracts. Consequently, the Sind, Punjab & Delhi Railway took on several local contractors for the line running from Lahore southwards to Multan (now all in Pakistan). These contractors largely went broke, for many of the same reasons as their European counterparts: shortage of capital, rising wage rates and lack of organizational skills (something, by contrast, which Jamsetji had in spades). Most contracts, however, continued to be offered to Europeans despite the fact that they had a similarly patchy record and, as we have seen, were generally more expensive.
Dorabji’s success demonstrated that the British rail companies’ insistence on handing out contracts to Europeans contributed to the high cost of the work. Many did not know what they were doing and were at the mercy of local sub-contractors. Work generally was broken down into stretches of perhaps twenty to forty miles, but occasionally much bigger sections of a hundred miles were allocated. The boom in railway construction in the decade after the Rebellion led to a rapid increase in the number of these contractors and, according to Edward Davidson, about two fifths of the work before 1868 was carried out by small contractors and 13 per cent by major international concerns, like the one run by Thomas Brassey, possibly one of the world’s first truly multinational businesses.
The rest of the contracts, interestingly, were undertaken by the companies themselves as they found it was often the most efficient way to ensure the work was completed, and was ultimately cheaper as there was less need for oversight and double-checking. Note, however, that at this time, until the basis of the contracts was changed in 1869, the guarantee system ensured a good rate of return for the shareholders, while placing few constraints on the contractors carrying out the work.
Costs, therefore, were not as low as might be expected given the cheapness of labour. The average construction expenditure per mile in the period up to the end of 1868, by which time 4,000 miles of track had been completed, was £18,000, more than double the estimate of £8,000 on which Dalhousie had based his calculations. In Britain, the comparable price at the time was around £32,000 per mile, but that included the very expensive compensation claims of landowners, and the cost of fencing along the tracks, as well as the extensive legal costs required in pushing the bill to build the line through Parliament, none of which had to be paid by the railway companies in India. The situation in India was elegantly summed up by William Massey, who was finance minister under two viceroys during this period and was convinced that the cost of construction of the East Indian Railway was double what it should have been: ‘All the money came from the English capitalist, and so long as he was guaranteed five per cent from the revenues of India, it was immaterial to him whether the funds that he lent were thrown into the Hooghly or converted into brick and mortar.’5
Apart from the flaws in the guarantee system, the other factor behind the high costs was that labour often proved to be more expensive than expected since it was not always possible to find sufficient people willing to work for the wage on the offer. The process of finding workers was complex as the contractors had to deal with dozens of sub-contractors and muccadums – overseers – who were the ones with access to peasant and tribal societies that supplied the labour. On some projects, there was a shortage of local people willing to work on the railways, while on others wages were pushed up locally by the massive and urgent requirements of the construction. The difficulties of recruiting labour worsened as more lines were created, but over time a pan-Indian pool of experienced labour emerged, which made it easier for new companies to find suitable workers.
Even though many native people had no desire to work for money – India was a pre-capitalist society at the time – the railway companies found it relatively easy to train locals to carry out the skilled and semi-skilled tasks required in building the railways, such as turners, fitters and smiths, but once recruitment began, wages were inevitably driven up. This was, according to Davidson, ‘very trying to engineers who have based their estimates upon current prices; and to shareholders who have accepted their calculations’.6
The wages were commensurately low by world standards, around 4–6 old pence (1.67–2.5p) per day, less than railway workers in any other country. The level of wages in India partly reflected the fact that on average 40 per cent of the workforce were women and an estimated 10–15 per cent boys, all of whom were paid far less than the men. Figures from the Madras Railway, for example, show that the proportion of women was, at times, even higher. In 1855, of nearly 6,000 workers, almost half (2,900) were women and 840 were boys, leaving just 2,100 (35 per cent) men.7 This remarkably widespread involvement of women in the building of the railways is barely mentioned in many accounts of their construction – with the exception of Ian Kerr’s work – and remains little recognized today.
Moreover, while the wages were much lower than in the UK, the output of individual workers was far less than that of their British counterparts – usually skilled ‘navvies’, who travelled from site to site for work, gaining considerable experience. The Indian labourers, by contrast, were mostly recruited locally from villages where they eked out a living on subsistence agriculture and were new to the railway and, indeed, to any kind of paid work.
Indian railways were technologically behind the times, too. While railways built contemporaneously in the UK or the US were routinely using labour-saving devices such as steam excavators and ‘horse runs’ – harnessing a horse to a pulley which hauled up barrows full of earth on wooden planks laid on the embankment – in India every load of earth had to be taken away in baskets carried on the heads of the labourers. Consequently, while in the UK around fifty people were employed for each mile of railway under construction, around three times that number were required in India.
Specialist workers did eventually emerge. One notable group was the wodders or wudders – they were known by various names that were corruptions of the same word in different Indian languages, such as oddar, odde or vadda – who specialized in earthworks or, more specifically, excavating. A sub-group worked solely with stone. They were the nearest equivalent of British navvies because, like them, they were both particularly skilled at their job and itinerant, moving from railway to railway to work. They even, like the British navvies, had a reputation for hard drinking.
Their simple method of breaking up stone was efficient and well suited to the needs of the railway. The wodders would build a fire on the surface of a rock face, generally at night, and the heat would cause expansion that would eventually result in a segment bursting off. The scattered pieces would then be broken up into fragments with a heavy boulder to create square blocks of stone. The first recorded mention of the wodders is on the Madras Railway in 1853 by the chief engineer, who reported how they worked in small groups under an overseer who had gathered a little capital, and thereafter ‘the Wudders remained a ubiquitous and numerous presence among the railway construction workers in South India and beyond’.8
While the recruitment of labourers was patchy, and at times difficult, it was, according to Davidson, easier to recruit ‘clerks, book-keepers and accountants … in any number, as the Indian mind shows an aptitude for figures’ and ‘the young men of the upper class’9 picked up English rapidly. The railway, therefore, was responsible for the genesis of the Indian middle class, one that would expand along with the railways and would help to spread the English language across the subcontinent.
As the construction rate became faster, the core of the network, the series of lines emanating from the ports, began to take shape and work started on several lines linking the main inland towns and cities. While the size of the network merely doubled to 840 miles in the two years following the Rebellion, a decade later the network envisaged by Dalhousie had 4,000 miles in operation.
The two pioneers, the East Indian Railway and the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, both had more than 1,200 miles. The most important line was the East Indian route between Calcutta and Delhi via Allahabad, which was completed in 1864. The Allahabad–Jabalpur branch line of the East Indian Railway opened three years later and was connected with the Great Indian Peninsula Railway in 1870, making it possible to travel from Bombay to Calcutta via Allahabad, thus connecting three of India’s four most important cities. This route was officially opened in March of that year and it was later part of the inspiration for the French writer Jules Verne’s book Around the World in Eighty Days.
At the time, Madras, the fourth key city, was also developing a network befitting its importance and just under 500 miles had been completed by the Madras Railway, which had been rather late out of the starting blocks because it had not been one of the two ‘experimental’ lines. It was not until 1871 that the Madras Railway became part of the wider network, with the completion of a connection to the Great Indian Peninsula Railway at Raichur providing a route between Bombay and Madras, while avoiding the city of Bangalore, which was something of an obstacle because it is 900 metres above sea level.
The next most important railway in terms of route mileage was the Sind, Punjab & Delhi, which had emerged from four separate but related companies that had initially tried to create a combined railway and steamship route from the newly established port of Karachi (now in Pakistan); however, they found that the currents of the River Indus were too strong and decided on a railway line instead. The route crossed the Sind desert and ran alongside the massive Indus, then up to Amritsar and Lahore. The company was also entrusted with building a 300-mile line from Amritsar to a junction with the East Indian near Delhi, making possible, when it opened in 1870, the rapid and efficient movement of troops to the strategically important but troubled North-West Frontier.
While the railways were becoming a crucial part of India’s economy, the impact back in the UK was equally significant. In the decade following the Rebellion, some £70m was invested in Indian railways. Such a major demand for capital had the obvious result of pushing up interest rates in the UK, thereby weakening the economy at a time when capitalism was beginning to take off. This caused some consternation among ‘British farmers and domestic business [who] at times complained that money for their own needs was obtainable only at unusually high rates of interest’.10
In India, there were concerns, too. The effect of this extensive and expensive investment in railways, backed by the government guarantee, proved to be a massive burden on the Government of India which had to make up the shortfall when railways did not earn the guaranteed 5 per cent rate of return. In fact, there were only a couple of routes which generated more than the 5 per cent. The East Indian Railway line between the two major cities of Calcutta and Delhi, favoured by low gradients, a supply of cheap coal from its own mines and well-patronized trains thanks to the high population density in the corridor it served, paid its way right from the beginning. It was a busy railway with fifteen trains daily in each direction and it struggled to cope with demand from passengers. The doubts about whether the ‘natives’ would use the iron road had been well and truly assuaged. Overall, freight was boosting profitability and accounted for two thirds of the East Indian Railway’s income in 1869, compared with an almost insignificant 4 per cent in its first couple of years of operation. The other profitable company was the Great Indian Peninsula, which also soon reached the 5 per cent threshold thanks to the fact that, like the East Indian, it was carrying large quantities of freight.
As a result of the growth in freight and healthy passenger numbers across the railway network, by 1866 all the other railway companies, apart from the thirty-mile-long Calcutta & SouthEastern, were profitable but none, apart from the original two, had reached the 5 per cent threshold, requiring the Government of India subsidy to make up the shortfall to investors.
The soaring cost of building and maintaining the lines was the big barrier to long-term profitability. If the railways had been built more efficiently, both at a lower cost and to allow for faster operations, there would have been little need for the guarantee payments. It was the Government of India which was always the long-stop both in terms of excessive costs and lack of revenue. The bridge collapses, mentioned in the previous chapter, were a typical example of the way that the risk of the railway enterprise was placed fully on the shoulders of the Government of India – in other words, Indian taxpayers – while the companies’ investors were still guaranteed their generous return. When sections of the railway needed to be rebuilt, the additional railway investment still had to earn the agreed rate of return. With the low level of profitability of most lines, by the summer of 1868 the Government of India, by no means flush with cash, had been required to fork out £23m to meet the costs of the guarantee. This might have been more acceptable had that money largely remained in the subcontinent. However, it did not. It was, in effect, a subsidy to the colonial power since, of 50,000 shareholders in the railway companies, fewer than 1 per cent – a mere 400 – were Indians. They were hampered by the fact that the shares could be traded only in London and not in India, which still had no stock exchange. Given that the vast majority of contracts were going to British-based contractors, as we have seen, just under half the total amount invested in the entire Indian railway by 1870 had been spent in Britain, not India.
The high level of subsidy could not be tolerated in the long run, either economically or indeed politically, given the tensions between Indians and their colonial masters in the aftermath of the Rebellion. Already in 1862, the Governor-General, Lord Canning, aware of the railway problem, had attempted to call a halt to the guarantee process, announcing, ‘I will not guarantee a single rupee for a single day’. Like many politicians, he was unable to keep to his word. He started by taking a firm stance when he ended negotiations with the projected Oudh Railway Company on the basis that no more guarantees would be forthcoming. Instead, the promoters of the line were told to try to attract private investors, but, given that most of the early railways were not earning a decent rate of return without the guarantee, there were few takers.
Canning partly relented when James Wilson, a former engineer with the East Indian, suggested the formation of a new company, the Indian Branch Railway, to build a network of lines in Oudh, which had been one of the key centres of the Great Rebellion. Canning agreed to provide a subsidy of £100 per mile for twenty years and that attracted sufficient investors for work to start. However, the Government of India insisted that the lines be built to its normal 5ft 6in gauge to ensure a through connection with the East Indian Railway, whereas Wilson had envisaged a smaller 4ft gauge to reduce costs. Consequently, the venture soon foundered and, in a story that is familiar in railway development across the world, the state bailed out the company with a £60,000 loan and the same 5 per cent guarantee, though with a more tightly worded contract than its predecessors had. The company was reformed into the Oudh & Rohilkhand Railway and they eventually built an extensive network linking east and north India based around Lucknow. Similarly, the Indian Tramway Company, which planned to build a branch line near Madras, was also required to search for its own private capital, but it failed to do so and was granted a 3 per cent guarantee. That was not enough to prevent the company going into liquidation and later re-emerging as the Carnatic Railway, before being absorbed into the South Indian.
These were, however, the last throes of the compensation system in its original and most generous guise. To the Government of India, the system was perceived as a recipe for corruption and inefficiency, and had to be reformed as otherwise there was the prospect of an endless and limitless series of demands for state support from the rapidly expanding railways: ‘The companies were relying more and more upon state aid rather than upon energetic and efficient conduct of the railways.’11 The Government of India decided, belatedly, to build railways itself and persuaded Whitehall to agree, even though such direct state enterprise was anathema to most politicians of the age, who were uncomfortable about government interfering in the commercial sphere. The engineers working for the Government of India were confident that they could build and operate more cheaply than the state-guaranteed private companies and pressed hard for this change. Lawrence, the Governor-General, stressed, in his dealings with UK ministers, that the Government of India was getting a bad deal: ‘The whole profits go to the companies, and the whole loss to the Government [This was not strictly true since, as mentioned above, there was some profit-sharing arrangement] … It is an abuse of language to describe as an interference with private enterprise what is only a refusal to support private speculators and to guarantee them from all possible loss by the credit of the state.’12
However, to the disappointment of the authorities in India, the British government agreed to soften the blow for the private railway owners by revising the contracts for the existing lines on terms even more favourable than before. In future, though, it was agreed that any additional railways would be built and operated by the Government of India. Since the entire cost of the railways was now directly the responsibility of the state, there was far more pressure to build lines cheaply and the most obvious way to do this was by reducing the size of the gauge. This was hugely controversial. The width of the gauge is one of those issues that may sound boringly technical but it pops up everywhere in the history of the railways, almost invariably the cause of much disagreement. It was to cause much angst and consternation in India and would result in no fewer than three parliamentary inquiries.
It was a matter of balance. Building a narrow railway is far cheaper in every respect, requiring fewer materials, less groundwork, and consequently less labour, and is cheaper to operate (though more expensive if costs per passenger or ton-mile of freight are used as the measure). On the negative side, narrow-gauge railways have less capacity and have the big disadvantage that both goods and people have to move from one train to another at the point where there is a change of gauge. The optimal structure for a railway network is for narrow gauge to be built for less well-used branch lines that connect with the broad-gauge main lines. In India, it did not work out like that with, eventually, nearly 20,000 miles of narrow-gauge railway being constructed, including some lengthy main lines that connected major cities, sometimes running in parallel with existing broad-gauge routes.
Dalhousie had set out very clearly to create a system of interconnected lines using a unique gauge because he was aware that in Britain the Great Western’s decision to have a much broader gauge was, at the time he was setting out the network, causing considerable trouble at interchange points. However, now that the core of the strategic Indian network had been built, and routes that were likely to be less intensively used were being considered, logic dictated that they should be built to a narrower gauge, especially as the Government of India was footing the whole bill for their construction. The issue was first raised by Lawrence, who, complaining about the high cost of the railways, argued that cheaper railway construction and operation could be achieved through railways being built, owned and operated by the state, and that in a poor country such as India narrow-gauge lines might be the only feasible option. The debate raged on for decades. As G. S. Khosla, the official historian of the Indian railways, writing in 1988, put it: ‘The gauge question agitated the minds of the builders of railways, the boards of the railway companies, government authorities in India and England and the British Parliament for well over a quarter of a century.’13 Indeed, worries about the gauge issue even reached the British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, who, in Parliament, soothed the concerns of MPs by reassuring them that all decisions regarding gauges of Indian railways would be considered carefully – a typical politician’s promise.
In order to convince opponents that the concept of narrow-gauge railways was viable, their supporters in the Government of India pointed to examples of successful railways across the world. The Ffestiniog railway, a slate line in north Wales built in the 1830s to a gauge that was a fraction under 2ft, was referred to as an example of a successful narrow-gauge operation. This was, in fact, a rare example in the UK, which actually had very few narrow-gauge lines compared with most other equivalent countries, but there were already numerous other examples in British colonial territories where such railways had been built in order to keep costs down and had proved to be lucrative and useful.
The British government, which, remember, did not pay for the railways, was initially sceptical, arguing, as Dalhousie had done, that a single unified network was essential to create a smooth-running system. In particular, there were fears that having to transfer from one gauge to another would hamper the military if troops needed to be moved quickly around the country. Eventually, however, the authorities in Britain accepted Lawrence’s argument that in order to open up regions without railways, the choice for India was clear. Unless these lines were built using narrow gauge, it would be uneconomic to build them at all.
The issue was finally resolved by the Viceroy of India, Lord Mayo, who was in office between 1869 and 1872 and had no hesitation in creating a second, cheaper, gauge, with the statement: ‘When we have an elephant’s load, we may use an elephant, but when we have only a donkey’s load, we have to use a donkey.’14 But which gauge would be the donkey? Across the world railways had appeared in a variety of sizes, ranging from 2ft to Brunel’s favoured 7ft (and that extra ¼ inch). In 1862, a twenty-mile line had already been built in Baroda, one of the princely states still not directly under British rule, using a 2ft 6in gauge, and while initially it had used oxen for haulage, it later became a conventional railway. Then there was the initial nineteen-mile line of the Indian Tramway Company built near Madras using a 3ft 6in gauge.
It is difficult to exaggerate the amount of debate – much of it conducted in newspapers, which seemed obsessed by the issue – that led to the final decision. Mayo rejected 2ft 9in as that did not have a track record elsewhere and, oddly, because he reckoned that cavalry horses could not travel two abreast on such vehicles. On the other hand, he thought the 3ft 6in used elsewhere in British territories was still too large and expensive. Therefore, he plumped for the metre (3ft 3⅜in) gauge, a strange decision in a country which used the Imperial system of measurement for everything from money to liquids. The controversy continued to rage even after the decision had been made. In some cases, local people organized protests when the plans for a new railway envisaged a metre-gauge, rather than a broad-gauge, line because they felt, with some justification, that they were being offered a second-rate railway. Ultimately, it came down to money rather than practicality. Broadly, in 1880, it was estimated that a narrow-gauge railway would cost half the price of the broad gauge, about 70,000 rupees (around £4,700) per mile compared with 166,000 rupees (around £11,000) per mile.
Therefore, the last years of the 1860s marked a double shift in direction: the end, or, more accurately, the curtailment of the guarantee system, and the beginnings of the construction of what was to become a key part of India’s railways, the metre-gauge network. Mayo, who was to meet an untimely end in 1872 at the hands of a murderous inmate on an official visit to the prisoner community on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, actually wanted a bigger role for the state than merely the construction of new lines because of the failure of the guarantee arrangements to bear down on costs. Most of the early guarantee contracts did, in fact, have a clause specifying that the Government of India could take over ownership after a period, which was normally twenty-five years, after they opened. Mayo argued that ‘direct action of the state was most likely to bring generally satisfactory results’15 and consequently he favoured state ownership. This was radical stuff from a Victorian politician and contrasted remarkably with the structure of the UK railways, where such state interference would be considered anathema.
Despite the opposition of the private companies to these arrangements, for a decade the Government of India prevailed and built a series of lines, as well as taking over several others. The first to fall into government hands was the worst financial basket case, the Calcutta & South-Eastern, which had opened in 1862 and struggled for traffic. The thirty-mile line linked Calcutta with a new harbour called Port Canning, which was expected to become a rival to its well-established neighbour, but the anticipated growth in shipping never materialized. Consequently, its owners decided to surrender the railway to the government in 1868 when it became clear that it would struggle ever to pay its running expenses, let alone make any return on capital.
Soon work was started by the Government of India on various schemes which had been held up by failure to attract investment or by bureaucratic procedures. The first construction to be undertaken by the state was for a line north of Lahore (in what is now Pakistan) to Peshawar, which eventually became the Punjab Northern State. Although it was initially envisaged that the line would be metre gauge, the British government was concerned about the military implications of a break in gauge and consequently it was built as a broad-gauge line. So was another railway in what is now Pakistan, the Indus valley line, which was also seen as key to military deployment.
While the majority of the new metre-gauge lines were short branches delivering goods and passengers to the main line, others were major routes in themselves. The most significant of the early ones was the Rajpatuna (an area that encompasses today’s state of Rajasthan and parts of neighbouring states) and Central India system of lines that became a vital and heavily used railway. It started life as a modest plan to provide an export route for salt from the Sambar Lake in Rajasthan, a former inland sea with huge quantities of the mineral, via the nearest main town of Jaipur. However, the railway gradually grew into a scheme to link Bombay with Delhi and Agra, which eventually had connecting stations with the East Indian, the Great Indian Peninsula and the Bombay, Baroda & Central India Railways.
For the most part, the other new metre-gauge lines followed the original intention of supplementing the broad-gauge network because, as Khosla puts it, ‘the requirements of many of the districts into which it was proposed to extend railway communications would be amply served by lines of less capacity than hitherto adopted’.16 The smaller gauge and the simple structure afforded by the government’s direct involvement meant that railways could be built more quickly as well as cheaply. For example, a ninety-mile line between Hisar and Rewari in Haryana state west of Delhi was completed in June 1883, just two years after being first surveyed. Metre-gauge lines were never allowed into the key ports of Madras, Calcutta and Bombay from which the railways had originally emanated, but, nevertheless, by the turn of the century there were more than 10,000 miles of these lines. Indeed, many had substantial traffic and this caused major headaches for railway managers because they necessitated the creation of transfer stations between the gauges, which became a source of inefficiency that would blight the Indian railways to such an extent that a programme of conversion from metre to broad gauge, Project Unigauge, was initiated in 1991 (see Chapter 10).
Eventually a system of fifty-three transfer stations built up, and the administrative and practical difficulties of operating them were clear from the outset. Thanks to the delightful writings of Jim Corbett,17 a railway manager charged towards the end of the century with running a busy transfer station, we have some fascinating details of the sheer scale of the task. Corbett, who had undertaken a variety of duties on the railway, including driving trains, was offered, at the tender age of twenty, the job of running the transshipment facilities at Mokameh Ghat (near Patna, the capital of Bihar), between the metre-gauge Bengal & North Western Railway and the broad-gauge East Indian. Corbett was sent by the Bengal & North Western at the busiest time, the summer harvest period, to find that there were around 400 wagons of each gauge waiting to be unloaded and transferred to one another. Apparently, this chaotic scene was an annual event and caused much loss to the railway. The task was made more difficult by the fact that the two railways were separated by the mighty Ganges, requiring all goods to be transshipped between them by ferry. He found the warehouse bulging with goods and the lines blocked with loaded wagons, but managed to sort it out through the clever organization of his personnel.
Previously everything had been done by a labour company, but now Corbett was to be entirely responsible and he quickly took on a workforce of 172 (his description is very precise). He reported that he was paid 1 rupee 7 annas (the equivalent of 1s 11d, or just under 10p) to move 1,000 maunds, equivalent to thirty-five tons. He accepts in his book, My India, that this ‘appears incredible’ as it was so little, but stressed that its accuracy can be ‘verified by reference to the records of the railway’. Even then, for a three-month period he was unable to pay the workers, who were on piecework, as money was not forthcoming from the railway company. He retained their loyalty only because one of his headmen, who was about to announce that the unpaid workers would walk off the job, found that Corbett ate the same spartan meals – a couple of chapattis and a bit of dhal – as his labourers because he, too, was not being paid. The headman persuaded his team to continue working and Corbett finally managed to convince his company to send through the required funds.
There is possibly some artistic licence here since Corbett was something of a chancer, but his account broadly tallies with other stories of life on the Indian railways in the late nineteenth century. He was to keep the contract for twenty-one years, even during his absence on service in France and Waziristan during the First World War, and his later career as a hunter and conservationist led to the naming after him of a tiger sanctuary at Garhwal in the state of Uttarakhand two years after his death in 1955.
The Government of India was not the only state agency involved in railway construction. The rulers of several princely states, which were semi-autonomous monarchies more or less controlled by the British, were keen on joining the railway age and were willing to contribute towards their cost. The Gaekwad of Baroda (now part of Gujarat) built a line in the 1860s, but a more ambitious project was undertaken at the instigation of the Nizam (king) of Hyderabad (now in Telangana state) to connect the city with the Great Indian Peninsula Railway. It was a joint arrangement between the Nizam, who provided the capital, and the Government of India, which built the 121-mile broad-gauge line through reasonably easy territory, including a short branch. It was completed in 1874, three years after the start of work, and was later extended into a much bigger network, again with capital from the Nizam’s government.
The longest metre-gauge line of the early princely state railways was the railway network built by the coalition of states in Kathiawar, a peninsula in north-west India that is now mostly part of Gujarat, where 455 miles of metre-gauge lines were built by the end of the century. It was a joint enterprise part funded by the local states and run by the Bombay, Baroda & Central India Railway.
The Government of India may have been successful in building and operating railways, but it failed in one important respect. While, as we shall see, workshops for maintaining the permanent way and the rolling stock sprung up all around India, there was no attempt to create a genuine rail supply industry in the subcontinent. This is well illustrated by the source of locomotives throughout the pre-Independence era. By the end of 1869, just over 1,000 British steam locomotives were in main-line operation, with none having been built in India, and that domination would continue throughout the colonial period. Supplies of materials and equipment, therefore, largely still came by ship from the UK. Despite this, the private Indian railway companies based in the UK were unhappy with the involvement in the railways by the Government of India and, in the mid-1870s, launched a concerted lobbying campaign to reclaim the main role in the development of the network. This was hardly surprising given the generosity of the past arrangements and they argued that it was only the private sector which had sufficient capital to fund further investment, a familiar position taken by their counterparts in today’s debates around the sale of government assets. The companies’ case was given a boost thanks to an unlikely source, a famine that swept across parts of India in the mid-1870s, which they were able to exploit for their own ends.