EIGHT
ESTABLISHMENT OF THE RAILWAY
THE DISCONNECTION BETWEEN the experience of the European users of the railway and that of the average Indian was quite remarkable. It was as if the conditions endured by Indian travellers took place on a completely different system to the one used by passengers in the premium classes. The disparity was far greater even than between air travellers today. That is well illustrated by a lengthy analysis in the British-based Railway Gazette, which produced several special issues on Indian railways in the period before and after the First World War.
The anonymous reporters, who looked in depth at the operation of Indian railways, could not hide their enthusiasm for the system. The first impression was striking:
On an Indian railway, one is at once struck by the smart appearance of the guards and stationmasters in their white uniforms. The price of ‘ducks’ [cotton canvas trousers and jackets] and of washing being so much less than at home, clean suits are often donned daily … the permanent way on many of the lines is magnificently kept but there are exceptions to this remark as to that on cleanliness of the carriages … all station names and most notices are in English … and in many places given in four languages.1
It all seemed rather like back home, or, indeed, rather better: ‘The European waiting rooms are often, in smaller stations, arranged for the use of passengers by night (bringing of course their own bedding) with baths, and in most cases good meals … Good station gardens are sometimes to be found in the south and as a rule even the smaller stations offer successful examples.’2 Even the equivalent of W. H. Smith was available: ‘Book stalls are found at all the larger stations and refreshment rooms … the food is as good as that in the hotels (more cannot be honestly said) and reasonable in price.’3 The only complaint from the reporter who travelled on the North Western Railway for a later edition of the Gazette was that the menu on the train offered a bit too much choice:
Soup Italian
Boiled fish and butter sauce
Mutton cutlets
Teal salmi [strongly flavoured game duck]
Roast sirloin of beef
Cheese boondia [sweet little garam flour balls]
Albert pudding [a kind of bread pudding]
Strawberry cream and peaches
Cheese biscuit
Dessert and coffee
The reason for the wide choice, he surmised, was to cater for ‘hot weather appetites’ and ‘customers with livers [who] always complain unless there is ample choice of dishes’.4 This was clearly very expensive to provide and the Gazette admitted that it was not always economic, since on many long-distance trains ‘there are only a few upper class passengers who are desirous of taking meals en route but the catering staff has to be prepared to meet emergencies as they arise’ – emergencies being, of course, a sudden influx of European passengers. There was also a constant supply of water provided in a reserved compartment with an attendant always on duty to supply ice and ‘aerated waters’ at any time of the night or day. The Gazette saw this as a life saver: ‘How essential this is only those can realise who know that too often in India there is death lurking in an unconsidered drink of water, and the same grim visitor has more than once stalked into a compartment on the long journey across the stony wilds of the Deccan or the Scinde desert in pitiless hot weather and claimed a victim that some ice would have saved.’5
It was, again, the third-class passengers who were subsidizing the teal and the roast sirloin of beef (the latter, of course, would have been deeply offensive to Hindus had they known how the profits from their fares were being used): ‘Despite high first class fares, it is doubtful whether first-class passenger travel was ever remunerative for the railways.’6 First class was not even the most luxurious form of transport on the railways: ‘The private coaches of the agents and government officials are exceedingly well designed and tastefully decorated, but those of the native princes are naturally the more gorgeous.’7 The Gazette did belatedly notice the Indian passengers, reporting that ‘the platforms offer a picturesque site with the crowds of natives squatting on the platforms or in the waiting rooms and while the train is in, with the crowds of sellers of sweetmeats, native food, curios (small stuffed alligators, for instance) etc.’,8 but mentioned little about their conditions of travel, other than that they seemed to enjoy being packed in: ‘Third and intermediate class had four rows of parallel, longitudinally placed seats … but the natives appear to enjoy plenty of company.’9
However, the Gazette realized that all was not well on the railways. There was insufficient investment and consequently India was short of railway track in relation to its size. Much more money was needed. The Gazette placed the blame firmly on the fact that the budget for the railways was part of the overall government accounts and was, therefore, dependent on vagaries, such as ‘the success or failure of crops, visitations of plague, political or military disturbances, and other things …’10 In an argument redolent of that used by supporters of privatization in the John Major government of the mid-1990s, the Gazette strongly opposed greater government involvement, suggesting instead that the private sector should fill the investment gap. The author seemed to demonstrate wilful ignorance of the history of Indian railways and their struggle to attract capital which led to the controversial government guarantees, by insisting that there were plenty of potential funders in Britain willing to come forward. Even though, as previously mentioned, since 1900 the railways had turned the corner and begun, taken as a whole, to be profitable, the need to provide security for British investors remained paramount, and without renewed guarantees, which had become politically unpalatable, there was little appetite among private investors to build new lines. Although all the major towns and cities were connected to the network before the outbreak of the First World War, many sizeable and growing urban areas remained off the railway map as India had a far less dense railway system, in terms of track per square mile of land mass, than most European countries or the US. Reaching those places off the railway track was not easy. In these cases, the Gazette noted, ‘The government provides a tonga – two wheeled covered cart – service to many places where there are no railways … tonga travelling is fatiguing for long distances as the speed averages 9–10 mph and the horses which are frequently changed often gallop or canter for the whole stage.’
In keeping with the political zeitgeist in the UK, the Gazette had ideological objections to the involvement of government in the railways: ‘The chief objections to state-worked railways in any democratic country are firstly, the danger of the employees putting pressure, by means of the ballot or otherwise, on the government and of the government making the railways part of the political machine – and secondly the loss of efficiency and stifling of enterprise and initiative.’11
Ignoring the fact that India was hardly a democracy whilst under British rule, the argument about the public sector has been used by opponents of nationalization, ever since the first lines were built, in debates across the world and was, as we see below, considered in depth by the Acworth Committee. Indeed, these words could well have appeared in John Major’s Tory manifesto of 1992, which resulted in Britain’s railways being privatized.
The Gazette, an influential voice at the time, however, indulged its prejudices. The magazine argued that the ‘pressure of native opinion, usually noisy, caused more natives to be employed as officials on the state lines than would be the case were efficiency the sole consideration, or than the companies find desirable’. In fact, the move towards Indianization was well underway by the early years of the twentieth century, stimulated, as we have seen, both by government policy and by the expense and difficulty of recruiting sufficient Europeans and Eurasians.
There was, however, another problem with state-owned railways. They were too nice to their passengers as, according to the Gazette, ‘for safety sake, all third-class passengers were formerly locked in waiting rooms, as on the Continent, to prevent their attempting to board trains before coming to rest. Now certain of the state lines have been compelled to discontinue this practice as “humiliating to the native”.’ In fact, locking the passengers who had arrived early for their trains into waiting rooms had not been a widespread practice as it was simply impractical and there were many stations where the passengers could not be prevented from entering the platform before the arrival of the train, as witnessed by the Gazette itself, with its description of the numerous sellers quoted above.
The Gazette had failed to recognize or reflect the depth of antagonism from the native population towards the railways and their British owners. The tide was flowing in the opposite direction to the Gazette’s imperial view. The Indian public, or, more specifically, the Indian elite, took the opposite stance about ownership of the railways. Nationalization would enable more investment and greater control, and fewer remittances to British shareholders.
As we have seen, the Government of India’s policy in the early years of the twentieth century was rather confusing since it was assuming ownership of most of the network as the old guarantee contracts ran out, while handing the operations back to the previous owners. By 1908, all the major lines had been purchased or reclaimed by the government and most had been leased out to private companies, creating what was, in modern parlance, a Public–Private Partnership. The involvement of these British companies, which were still run from the UK with a European ‘agent’ – effectively the Chief Executive Officer – managing the company in India, was hugely unpopular. The Indian public was alert to the contradictions of this policy, and a controversy in 1910 over returning the operation of the South India Railway to its previous owners when the previous contract ran out was to prove instrumental in putting pressure on the Government of India to increase the role of the state in the running of the railways. The matter was raised that year in the Imperial Legislative Council, which despite its name was merely an advisory body, but had recently, following the Indian Councils Act of 1909, seen its predominantly Indian membership greatly increased and had become partly elected for the first time.
Gopal Krishna Gokhale, one of the leaders of the Indian National Congress, made a widely reported speech to the Imperial Legislative Council criticizing the failure of the railways to become sufficiently Indianized, and arguing for their nationalization. He was particularly incensed by the fact that Indians were still being discriminated against in terms of employment:
Whereas in the Public Works Department, a considerable portion consists of Indians, in the railway service it is only here and there that you find an Indian. Now if all the railways were managed by the Government, the Government would in the first place be more sympathetic to our aspirations than the board sitting in London, and, secondly, the Government would be more responsive to any pressure of opinion put on it.12
It was precisely the opposite of what the Gazette was advocating. Yet, Gokhale was on the moderate wing of the Indian National Congress, opposed to overthrowing the British and a key influence on Gandhi. His speech, therefore, had all the more impact, and the issue of nationalization was raised on numerous occasions by the Legislative Council in the following decade. Several resolutions passed by the Council urged the appointment of a committee of inquiry into the future ownership and management of the railways. Supporters of greater government involvement stressed that the state could save money as it would no longer have to pay profits to the companies – an argument frequently espoused these days by the Labour Party in Britain – and that a nationalized railway would benefit Indian interests, as it would be informed by local public opinion, rather than by members of a board of directors sitting thousands of miles away in London. There were complaints, too, from nationalists that the railway network was simply not up to its role as the mainstay of the subcontinent’s transport infrastructure. They pointed to how the Delhi Durbar, the huge ceremony in December 1911 marking the coronation of King George V, had caused a virtual paralysis in the network for several days because the railways could not cope with the huge crowds seeking to attend. There were, too, permanent bottlenecks in the system, notably the routes to and from the ports of Bombay and Calcutta, which, despite expansion such as quadrupling of sections of track, were unable to cater to the growing demand from both freight and local commuters.
The war only made matters worse. As part of the British Empire, India was immediately placed on a war footing as soon as Germany opened hostilities in August 1914. Inevitably, the railways were crucial to the war effort, but their long-term viability was sacrificed for the short-term benefit of helping the cause. Routine spending on maintenance was cut back and work on major capital projects ground to a halt. Not only was there a strain from the extra services used to send material and men to the front, via the main ports of Bombay and Karachi, but large quantities of railway equipment were exported to France, including locomotives and carriages (despite the need to change the gauge), as well as rails and sleepers. Therefore, repairs could often not be attended to and the condition of the whole system deteriorated markedly. All the equipment on little-used branch lines was removed and exported. Other material such as tools and spare parts was requisitioned for military purposes in East Africa and Mesopotamia (now Iraq), and many Indian railway workshops were transformed into factories for the production of shells, hospital coaches and other war equipment. The railways were also used to transport the thousands of Indian men who were enlisted in far greater numbers than from any other British overseas territory and fought for the British in Europe as well as the Middle East.
After a couple of years of the conflict, the system was at breaking point. As Kerr notes, ‘By December 1916, the railroads could no longer handle all the traffic requiring railed transportation, so passenger traffic was curtailed, fares increased, pilgrim traffic prohibited and a Central Priority Committee set up to control goods traffic.’13 Not surprisingly, these drastic measures had an immediate impact, reducing the number of passengers and the tonnage of goods being carried. Just over 400 million passengers were carried in the year to the end of March 1918, a drop of 50 million, or 13 per cent, from the previous year.
According to Sahni, the official historian of Indian railways, the system ‘emerged from the war in a battered and dilapidated condition. Rolling stock was in a state of disrepair and shortage of equipment was made worse by the fact that many locomotives and carriages had long passed the age of superannuation.’14 The war had left the network in dire straits, much like the railway system in the UK, which had also been greatly overused and neglected in those four years. The inevitable delays and cancellations added to the Indians’ antagonism towards the railway companies. Even the official history recognized that the system was near collapse by the end of the conflict: ‘Speeds were reduced owing to the worn-out track and ageing locomotives. All this naturally led to the restriction of passenger services, congestion in trains, serious curtailment in the carrying of goods and commodities, [and] unjustifiable economies in maintenance, repair and amenities, leading to wider and deeper public discontent and dissatisfaction.’15 The railways were the transport lifeline of the nation as the roads were remarkably primitive – and were to remain so until the end of the twentieth century – and therefore there was no alternative but the incredibly slow bullock carts when a railway line was out of commission.
There was no lack of examples of the system’s shortcomings: ‘Because of the absence of competition, but largely because shortage of capacity in relation to demand enabled railway managers to adopt a take-it-or-leave it attitude, freight consignors did not receive the best possible service.’16 That was an understatement. Freight train speeds were remarkably slow, averaging at times as little as 4 mph and showing little improvement in the early decades of the twentieth century. Freight was, in fact, the mainstay of the Indian railway, earning at the time around two thirds of its total revenue, and an even higher proportion in some companies. Yet, it was not always profitable because freight rates were determined by government, which was subject to conflicting demands, meaning that throughout the period of company ownership, and, indeed, for the most part right up to Independence, there was an underlying conflict between the railways and government over tariffs, as Westwood explains: ‘The government preferred low freight and passenger tariffs, regarding the railways as a means to economic development, while the railways preferred the opposite, having profit as the prime, though not sole, consideration.’17 By and large, rates remained low, sometimes unprofitably so, although occasionally the railway companies did manage to push up tariffs against the wishes of the Government of India.
The inadequacy of the rail freight service damaged the economy. The coal mines, and consequently the iron and steel industry, suffered greatly from the lack of proper transportation to shift minerals because of the poor state of the East Indian Railway, which had a virtual monopoly of coal transport. After grain, coal was the largest item of freight transport, and the service offered by the East Indian was widely criticized.
The company exploited its monopoly position by imposing high tariffs for the short journeys to Calcutta from the main Bengal coalfields, 150 miles from the port, but charged much higher rates per mile for longer trips. This proved counterproductive; because of the cost of the long rail journey across India, it was cheaper for the mining companies to send Bengal coal to Bombay via Calcutta rather than direct by rail. Instead of a 1,150-mile rail journey, with no transshipment required, the coal was carried on rail for the short trip to the port and then taken more than 2,000 miles by ship through the Palk Strait separating India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to reach Bombay. Although this journey required three transshipments, it remained cheaper than the single long rail journey. The higher rates imposed for long journeys meant, too, that some railway companies whose routes were far from the eastern coalfields actually found it economic to use British coal transported halfway around the world rather than the locally mined mineral.
Merchants and traders were also deterred from using the railways by the considerable rate of loss, partly from pilferage and partly from coal simply falling off overloaded wagons while running on poor track. Consignments were at times completely lost, their valuable cargo purloined by railway staff and local people, and yet the railway company refused to pay compensation or even weigh the wagons when they arrived to assess losses. The war greatly worsened the freight situation. By the end of the conflict, Nagpur (in Maharashtra), a key textile producer, was receiving supplies of cotton up to six months late. The railways were not only paying the price of the wartime effort, but also bearing the costs of the long period of under-investment which preceded the conflict.
The freight rates became a cause célèbre for the nationalists, who argued that the railway tariff policy held back India’s development. They complained that, despite the example above relating to coal, by and large freight rates to and from ports were kept down to lower the price of imports from Britain and to reduce the cost of exporting raw materials to the mother country. In 1924, in response to these criticisms, which came largely from Indian business people, a tribunal was established to set and regulate tariff rates across the rail network. Minimum and maximum freight rates were established, restricting exploitation while giving the companies some leeway over charges. Special rates were introduced as well to protect the domestic economy from imports of iron, steel and cement.
Despite all these complaints about the railways from both passengers and freight users, support for nationalization was by no means universal. The provincial councils set up as part of the 1909 reforms were divided in their views. Those in Bombay and Madras favoured state management, while the council in Bengal took the opposite stance. This was because the latter was dominated by European commercial interests and the split in opinion was reflected among the wider business community. The various European chambers of commerce generally favoured the continuation of the status quo, which was hardly surprising given that the railway companies themselves were part of this community, while their Indian equivalents, who had no personal stake in these companies, wanted state management.
The government equivocated throughout the 1910s over its role in the running of the railways but could do so no longer as the contract for the huge East Indian Railway was due to expire in 1919. The government hesitated over whether to continue as before, by handing over the management to a private company, or taking over operations itself. Its response, when faced with having to make a choice, was, in the traditionally British way, to appoint the East Indian Railway Committee,18 headed by Sir William Acworth, a barrister. He was far more suited to the role than his two predecessors, Robertson and Mackie, as he was also a renowned international railway economist and had written a seminal work on Britain’s railway network, Railways of England (and a similar tome on Scotland), as well as a textbook, The Elements of Railway Economics, based on lectures he gave at the London School of Economics.
Although Acworth was supposed to report solely on the question of public ownership and operation, inevitably he touched on the general state of Indian railways, whose condition had deteriorated in the war and which were owned and managed in a complex structure by diverse public and private bodies. This time, neither the chairman nor the committee members were the type of hapless amateur mentioned in relation to the Robertson Committee. The ten members of the committee, which included three Indians, were each an expert in their field and included major industrialists as well as people with great knowledge of railway systems. As Sahni reported, ‘according to witnesses who appeared before the Committee, except in the case of America, where even railways set up originally by the State were transferred to the control of private ownership, the experience of virtually every other country had shown that State ownership and State management was by far the best method of running and developing the railway system’.19 At the time, in Germany, Japan and Russia, railways had come fully under government control, while France was considering legislation for nationalization (and soon afterwards created the government-owned Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français). Similarly, in other parts of the British Empire, such as Australia and Canada, railways were run by the state.
Acworth, a former Tory councillor on the London County Council, was no radical but his report certainly was. He was firmly of the view that the Indian railways should be run by the state as it was simply impossible to justify the involvement of the British companies. At the time he started his enquiry, in 1920, the government owned 27,000 route miles but only managed two thirds of those itself. There were also a further 4,400 miles owned by the princely states and 5,750 in private hands. Not surprisingly, as a result, the system, which by then was the fifth-largest in the world, lacked coherence and consistency.
In a crucial minute written by Acworth on publication of the report in 1921 (which, interestingly, was supported by only four of the nine other committee members, including two of the three Indians), he argued that the very fact that public opinion was so strongly against the management of railways by British companies was a key factor in his thinking. The minute pointed out that the railways had not been built with British money, since investors were only shareholders earning a good rate of return, but rather ‘it is by money secured from the Indian taxpayer that the Indian Railways have been almost entirely built. It is the Indian public that uses the railways and pays the railway rates and fares.’20 The conclusion was unequivocal and one that the Government of India could not ignore, given the eminence of Acworth and his committee: ‘We have failed to find any solution of the problem submitted to us consistent with the retention of company management.’ Simply put, this meant that when contracts for the management of the railways ran out, they should all be taken over by the state. Indeed, although Acworth revealed that most of the committee members had a ‘strong prepossession in favour of private enterprise’, he argued that there was no other option than to allow the state to manage the railways.
There were two other main issues to resolve: the structure of the new organization – and in particular whether there should be one central organization or several smaller ones – and the control of finances. Again, Acworth was unequivocal. There was a widespread view that 37,000 miles of railway spread over such a vast country could not be run from one authority in Delhi, but Acworth disagreed. He pointed to France, where nationalization was to be under a single centralized organization, and to Germany, where both mileage and the amount of traffic were greater than in India, which was also run in that way. Moreover, the organization needed to have considerable autonomy in order to ensure it would not be constrained by rules and procedures that would hamper its ability to make commercial decisions free of political influence. Its budget, therefore, had to be separated out from other government finances.
The financial situation of the state-owned railways, whose accounts were merely a line on the government’s books and therefore did not have a clear budget, had been a familiar story, and one from which British Rail perennially suffered. When money was plentiful, government was ready to meet its prior promises for railway spending. However, when finances went awry – and in India this was not an infrequent occurrence, especially in relation to bad harvests, which both reduced government income and required expenditure on famine relief – the railways suffered, and making long-term plans for investment proved impossible.
Although the Mackay Committee in 1907 had specifically recommended that the railways be allocated a separate amount of capital expenditure annually in order to be able to plan ahead, in practice this had not happened. Schemes would be cut at a late stage and even routine maintenance might be delayed for want of money. Even the construction of new railways would be halted temporarily in the bad times and the committee quoted the example of the Itarsi–Nagpur Railway, linking present-day Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, which was started in 1908, but because of financial difficulties was not completed until seventeen years later, despite facing no particular engineering challenges.
Acworth was convinced that the under-investment in the railways was not the result of the excessive demands placed on the system during the war but, rather, the consequence of the government failing to prioritize their development. Given that the railways had been profitable since 1900, the committee found that had the railway budget been separate from government, ‘there would have been no difficulty in providing all the money the railways needed to keep up their programme of growth and development’.21 The new central organization must, therefore, have its own budget.
This was a momentous change and was effectively the genesis of the Indian Railways that exists today. The government accepted most of Acworth’s recommendations and the whole structure of the industry began to change, in what was a creeping gradual nationalization. Over the next three years, the Railway Board was reconstituted with extra powers and far greater independence, and railway finances were separated from government. Oddly, fearful that the finances could go awry, the government soon appointed what it called a ‘Retrenchment Committee’ – in modern parlance a ‘star chamber’ to make cuts – to look at ways for the railways to reduce what it perceived as high expenses. The chairman was none other than Sir James Mackay, now elevated to the House of Lords as Lord Inchcape. He was no expert, unlike Acworth, and recommended that the working expenses of the railways should be drastically cut. There were undoubted inefficiencies, but it seemed odd to focus on this aspect when the real problem of the railways was a long period of under-investment and even neglect. Inchcape was concerned that too much money was being invested in the system. As the Board assumed control, it did try to make savings through measures such as reducing staff, making better use of materials and preventing loss through theft and ticketless travel. In truth, however, these efforts were mostly in vain and corruption and theft remained rife, as the Railway Gazette, of 1923, noted: ‘Not only do portable articles such as glasses, soap and towels soon disappear from the carriages, but the leather straps in the windows and even the bronze or gun metal coat hooks seldom last long … In consequence, a different method of raising windows had to be adopted while the plainest malleable iron fillings are being used in many of the newer carriages.’22
Freight was frequently targeted by thieves, and new methods of sealing and locking wagons were being introduced. There were even parts of the rail network where permanent encampments of thieves had been established near the line where trains slowed or stopped at signals so that they could always be ready to pounce and plunder the wagons. The Acworth Committee addressed the corruption issue and discovered that shippers were being asked to pay stationmasters to obtain an adequate supply of wagons, given that there was often a shortage – or at least an alleged one. It was just one of the routine practices of corruption that bedevilled the railway (covered in more detail in Chapter 10).
The gradual nationalization – which would not be completed until after Independence – gathered pace in line with Acworth’s recommendations. The East Indian Railway had cynically moved its headquarters from London to India but could not stave off the inevitable. Along with the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, it was taken over by the government in 1925 and was merged with the Oudh & Rohilkand. This meant that the two biggest companies, which between them were responsible for more than a third of overall railway revenues, were nationalized.
Several other railways which had longer contracts were not brought into the government fold until the Second World War, including the Bombay, Baroda & Central India, the Assam–Bengal and the South Indian. However, even the railways which were not immediately nationalized and were still run from London realized that they had to change their policies and pay far greater heed to Indian public opinion.
The first half-dozen years of the new regime, up to 1930, were a boom time for the Indian railways. Passenger numbers rose steeply every year throughout this period, quickly recovering from the wartime restrictions which had seen them drop off temporarily. By 1921, passenger numbers had already reached 560 million per year, compared with just under 200 million at the turn of the century, on a network that had only grown by a few per cent in length. And this trend was to continue throughout the 1920s. It was a virtuous circle: an increase in investment led to widespread improvements which attracted more people to use trains. India was growing economically and clearly that generated quite a lot of this extra traffic.
The population was increasing, too, and commuting was becoming a regular habit in the major cities. There were some other, stranger, factors behind the continued increase. The Gazette reported that the Oudh & Rohilkand Railway, for example, enjoyed ‘very heavy passenger traffic chiefly due to the fondness of Indians for litigation and to the large number of pilgrims attending religious fairs or “melas”’. The rush to seek justice or redress was such, apparently, that ‘the timetables are as far as possible arranged to admit of litigants attending courts and returning to their homes every day’.23 That was quite possibly a first in railway history. The railway reported that weddings, too, a grand occasion in India, where every conceivable relative and long-lost friend is invited, were also a profitable source of revenue. It was probably too tactful to note that funerals were also good business.
The extra income from fares and freight charges, and the guaranteed funds for investment from the government, ensured there was plenty of money available for improvements to the network. The original Mackay Committee had recommended that the optimum route mileage for the entire system was 100,000 miles, compared with the 39,000 miles built by 1924. That was clearly far too ambitious, but the Railway Board developed a plan for rapid expansion of the network. The aim, announced in 1924 as a five-year programme, was to open 1,000 miles of new railway per year. The most significant addition was a 125-mile broad-gauge link in His Exalted Highness the Nizam’s Guaranteed State Railways (the official name of the railway in Hyderabad started in 1879 by the local ruler), between Ballarshah in Maharashtra and Kazipet in Telangana. This reduced the journey between Delhi and Madras, a key route connecting northern and southern India, by 200 miles.24 In the event, more than 4,000 miles of line were built on the Indian subcontinent in the six years running up to 1930, a time when many countries around the world had stopped building new railways. The continued expansion was partly the result of the fact that the network in India was still comparatively sparse in relation to both the land area and to the population, but also because of the growing recognition that, in a country with very poor roads, the railways were the mainstay of the nation’s transport infrastructure.
Sensibly, though, the investment funds were not only being spent on building new routes. A comprehensive programme of improvement for all aspects of the railway was implemented. The most notable was the electrification of suburban lines, which greatly speeded up performance. The first electric line, the ten-mile Harbour branch of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, from Bombay’s Victoria Terminus (now the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus but still known locally as VT) to Kurla, was opened with great ceremony in February 1925, and other suburban lines in the city soon followed.
Bombay was the natural location for electrification given its high density and its geography. The city is built on seven islands and a peninsula, and therefore access to the centre is constrained, giving railways a distinct advantage. Consequently, the city had a symbiotic relationship with its railways, the two growing in tandem with the suburban lines underpinning Bombay’s rapid expansion. The city’s textile industry required ever greater numbers of workers and commuting had already become a way of life for many by the turn of the century, when there were 400,000 local journeys daily on the tracks of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway and the Bombay, Baroda & Central Indian Railway, which both had a series of suburban stations. As Ian Kerr puts it, while various forms of motorized and animal transport developed in the suburbs, ‘only the trains, however, historically and today, could provide the mass transportation the commuters of the ever-growing Greater Bombay needed’.25 The two railways had to cope with carrying both vast quantities of raw cotton and manufactured textiles, as well as commuters, and consequently electrification was accompanied by the addition of tracks on many parts of the system, including even some four-tracking of particularly busy sections. The Railway Gazette, for once, was delighted, positively purring: ‘Electrification would be the most profitable expenditure the Government could make on railways today.’26
Interestingly, the oldest railways in India became the early pioneers of electrification. The suburban line to Kalyan, and the main route to Poona over the ghats, soon followed. The latter was selected for conversion because the extra power of the electric locomotives increased the speed and efficiency on this very heavily trafficked line, eliminating what had long been a bottleneck for services to and from the ever-expanding city. This knocked sixty minutes off the journey time between Bombay and Poona, reducing it to just three hours. This proved a great boon to members of the Bombay elite, who enjoyed nothing more than a day at the races at Poona’s Royal Western India Turf Club, the most prestigious racecourse in India, as the faster trains allowed them to get there and back easily in a day. The suburban system in Madras was also electrified by 1931, but then the Depression, with its reduction in rail traffic, stopped the programme. A plan to electrify Calcutta’s urban network was shelved, and not restarted till 1957, and no other lines were converted under the Raj.
There were plenty of other improvements in what was truly a golden period for the railways, and the system received something of a total makeover: the track bed, signals, workshops, locomotives, coaches and goods wagons were all modernized, and much new equipment was purchased. There was innovation, too, with the first colour-light automatic signals being introduced, along with larger freight wagons and new heavier locomotives, which allowed for bigger loads and shorter journey times. Some services were speeded up, though the railways remained, by international standards, rather slow. On the largest railway, the Bombay, Baroda & Central India Railway (3,850 route miles), the fastest service was the Frontier Mail, which covered the 865 miles between Bombay and Delhi in 23 hours 35 minutes, an average of 37 mph.
The quickest trains were those connecting with the P&O sailings to Bombay. In the early 1920s, the Great Indian Peninsula Railway operated express boat trains from the port to Madras, Delhi and Calcutta. These were seen as the most important services because they were part of the fastest connection between the UK and the major Indian cities, which it was now possible to reach in two weeks. Every Friday evening, in the early years of the twentieth century, a train left Cannon Street station in London for the coast, carrying passengers bound for India. After the short Channel crossing to Calais, they proceeded by rail to Brindisi on the Italian Adriatic Coast. From there, a small P&O steamer would take the passengers – and the mail bound for India which had travelled in a second train – to Port Said in Egypt, where a larger liner would convey them through the Suez Canal and on to Bombay. The Indian boat train services would meet this train precisely two weeks after the passengers had left London and transport them and the mail through to India’s other major cities at average speeds of around 36 mph. In comparison, in the UK during the interwar period the best trains routinely ran at an average speed of between 50 and 60 mph. Given the requirements of stops to allow people to eat and to take on water for the locomotives, and the maximum speed limit of 60 mph, such average speeds could never be achieved in India. Metre-gauge trains were even slower. For example, the relatively fast service connecting Madras with Tuticorin, connecting with the boat to Ceylon, took nearly twenty-two hours to cover the 443 miles, an average of a mere 20 mph. Those metre-gauge trains, which ran on little-used, single-track lines, often shared with freight trains, were even more sluggish, struggling to reach an average of 15 mph, which meant that even a run of a couple of hundred miles would normally require an overnight stay on the train.
Many stations were rebuilt in this period. There had long been a move away from the notion that stations should be built as fortresses which would provide a redoubt and protection for Europeans in the case of a repeat of the 1857 Rebellion. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, there had been a return to building stations in city centres rather than outside them, which had been justified on the basis that they would be easier to protect in the event of a riot. (There was a counter-argument, too, in that city-centre stations would allow troops to arrive rapidly by train to where the riot was likely to be taking place, such was the convoluted thinking indulged in by India’s colonial masters.)
Several magnificent stations were built in the belief that their aesthetic value would be appreciated by the local population, demonstrating that the railways were an elegant instrument of peaceful development rather than an ugly colonial imposition. The most impressive was undoubtedly the Victoria Terminus in Bombay, built in a Gothic Revival style, partly redolent of St Pancras, over a ten-year period, ending in 1888. Designed by Frederick William Stevens, it was the headquarters of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway and was extended in 1929 to accommodate more long- distance trains. The station’s revamp was celebrated with the launch of the fastest main-line train in India, the Deccan Queen, which replaced the slower Poona Mail, and became the continent’s first luxury train, offering accommodation solely to first- and second-class passengers and running just at weekends to serve Bombay’s mainly European spectators for the races at Poona. It halved the journey time of the old Poona Mail and for a time, hauling only a few elegant carriages, managed the 120-mile trip in just 2 hours 45 minutes, an average of 43 mph. The Great Indian Peninsula thought it unprofitable to run the train during the week, and, according to the history of the Victoria Terminus, only in 1943 ‘when Indians were allowed to travel on the train did traffic increase sufficiently to allow a daily service’.27 It was not until 1966, however, that third-class travellers were allowed to travel on the train.
Several other major stations were reconstructed at the time, notably in Lucknow, Howrah and Kanpur. At times of heightened tension, however, they could still be turned into fortresses, with armed soldiers at every corner housed in military posts and sentry boxes. As an obvious site of protest, and also being the key entry points to the country’s main form of transport, the protection of stations was forever uppermost in the minds of the colonial rulers.
Despite the widespread improvements for rail passengers, there remained considerable discontent with the railways. A good measure of the level of dissatisfaction was the disproportionate time spent in the Legislative Assembly on railway matters. A remarkable 30 per cent of questions28 raised in the Assembly in the year 1927/8 concerned the railways, covering a wide variety of topics, such as the Indianization of the railway service, new projects and even the purchase of coal. Passenger grievances remained high on the agenda, not least because, despite quasi-nationalization and considerable investment, little had been done to improve the lot of the third-class passenger, while the cosseted first-class travellers enjoyed ever greater luxury, such as the baths in every compartment of first class introduced during this period by the East Indian Railway.
In spite of such complaints, the implementation of Acworth’s recommendations resulted in a much improved railway in the interwar period. The editor of the Railway Gazette, writing at the end of the decade, was positively lyrical, noting that thanks to Acworth:
the railway administration for the first time were able to frame development programmes with the assurance that funds would be made available and as a result the past five years has been a period of ceaseless activity in the provision of facilities essential to meet the needs of the growing traffic. Remarkable improvements have been made and these have naturally been reflected in the financial position which, in the whole of Indian railways, has never been better.29
The editor went on to quote Sir Clement Hindley, the Chief Commissioner, Indian Railways, who reported how during the 1920s the railways had made ‘a remarkable recovery from a condition of insolvency and inefficiency amounting almost to a breakdown to undoubted financial prosperity and a state of efficiency as measured by public service which will bear comparison with the standard of any other railway system in the world’.30
It was not, though, all plain sailing for the railways. Even with the availability of a steady flow of funds and a far better structure to allow the railways to flourish, massive waste in spending that money and poor industrial relations were flies in the ointment. As is usual with organizations that suddenly find themselves flush with cash, there were issues of overspending, as Sir Charles Innes, the member of Legislative Council responsible for the railways, pointed out: ‘The principal difficulty with which we are now confronted is that of spending the money, that is, of executing rapidly sanctioned projects.’31 Schemes were costing as much as twice the original budget and local officials were given carte blanche to spend without adequate checks and with no recognition of the need to get value for money. To be fair, Indian railways were by no means the only ones guilty of gold-plating projects, particularly in the interwar period when railways across the world were beginning to face the full-on competition of cars and planes and were desperate to improve their technology.
Labour disputes, as we have seen, began to spread in the early years of the twentieth century, but it was after the war that they became far more prevalent. This was part of the interwar worldwide phenomenon of worker unrest, which led to revolutions in several countries, and to increased unionization almost everywhere else. The Indian railway unions grew rapidly in this period: the All India Trade Union Congress was formed in 1920 and, four years later, an All India Railwaymen’s Federation was created, with a dozen smaller unions as affiliates with a combined membership of around 200,000. The railway unions remained highly fragmented, with many small ones representing a particular trade, but also, just to add further complication, others based on caste or region. White-collar unions emerged during the same period, even though the workers undoubtedly had an easier time. More-educated Indians favoured clerical tasks, but the Railway Gazette complained how many were eager for an easy life: ‘far too many clerks willing to sit on their stools for 20 rupees per month and too few who would earn up to 100 rupees per month as a clerk in the shops’, where the work was harder and more intense.32 The Gazette, ever close to overt racism, put this down to the failure of the Indian ‘character’.
During the First World War, the shortage of labour and the rise in inflation that routinely accompanies conflict forced the railways to increase wages and allowances quite substantially, and some companies provided subsidized food grains as the war had caused prices to rise sharply. The rising trend of employment in the industry had continued apace and by 1921 there were 725,000 workers in the rail industry, mostly low-paid. The variety of tasks was immense, ranging from porters at stations and gangers on the permanent way to train examiners and even ferrymen, since the railways owned and operated numerous ships to navigate unbridged rivers. As the state took on more railways, Indian Railways became, by far, the biggest civil employer in India and, indeed, across the world, although it has now been overtaken by Wal-Mart.
There were inevitably many sources of dispute. Basic wages and conditions were, of course, often the issue, as well as the desire for job security. There was an inherent tension in the industry as most managers and foremen were still European or Eurasian, despite the various attempts at Indianization. The railways retained many petty rules and regulations, which frequently led to arbitrary fines being imposed, and there were numerous other disciplinary measures that demeaned the Indian workforce. The unions were strongest in the 145 major workshops dotted across India, but firemen, who were virtually all Indian, were also well-organized. Collective bargaining, almost unknown before the war, began to be the norm and in 1929 the government reluctantly recognized the All India Railwaymen’s Federation, setting up regular meetings with the union representatives.
There was the added radicalizing effect of the nationalist movement, which stimulated further discontent. The movement tried to exploit industrial disputes, sending in their agitators to liaise with the strikers. However, the relationship between the unions and nationalists was by no means a simple matter of mutual support. There was an expectation that the two groups always had common cause, but this was not necessarily the case, and, in fact, as we shall see, after Independence the Congress Party formed its own railway union in competition with the Federation. Nevertheless, the railway workers were a considerable force in society and many became active in the nationalist movement. There was undoubtedly a political undertone to the growing militancy of the workforce, as Khosla explains in his official history of Indian railways: ‘Workers resorted to these strikes not purely from the motive of forcing railway management to give them higher wages and better working conditions, but also to give expression to the national upsurge against a system, which has been largely exploited to serve the political ends of a foreign power.’33 Indians, in other words, were getting their own back.
According to Sahni, there were no fewer than forty-eight strikes in the financial year 1921/2, ‘lasting from a day or two to three months’.34 The East Indian Railway was particularly badly hit by a variety of disputes. In December 1921, for example, 7,000 workers, almost the whole workforce of the Lillooah works near Calcutta, walked out over a pay settlement. The disruption continued for a couple of months and led to riots at Howrah station the following February. Numerous other railways, such as the Oudh & Rohilkand, the Madras & Southern Mahratta and the Great Indian Peninsula, suffered from major industrial action in this period. The most bitterly fought strike was on the South Indian Railway in June to August 1928, when thousands of workers, angered over proposals for 3,200 redundancies and widespread pay cuts, walked out of their workshops and staged Gandhi-style sit-ins along the tracks. They managed to close down much of the rail network, and some 75,000 workers were then promptly locked out by the management. The Government of India was anxious that the unrest should not spread to other railways, which were also under pressure to reduce costs, and took a very hard line, sending in the police to break up demonstrations. The government was particularly concerned that the strike would become a cause célèbre for the nationalists and therefore tried to nip the protests in the bud. Armed escorts were provided on train services that were still operating, but several trains were derailed and there were numerous outbreaks of violence between the police and the workers. With the police making repeated lathi attacks (baton charges) and even using bayonets at times, the strikers’ resolve was broken and they went back to work after a few days, although incidents and protests continued until the beginning of August.
The readiness of the government to take such strong action showed how the railways were viewed as an important symbol of the rule of the Raj: ‘The South Indian Railway strike illustrated the lengths to which the colonial government would go to protect the smooth running of the railway system against any and all perceived threats … They realized that a successful strike by the mammoth railway labour force could easily have had a cascading effect on other sectors of industrial production.’35 While the more confrontational managers tried to have strikes made illegal, others sought conciliation, and there was even a suggestion for workers’ representatives to be appointed onto railway companies’ boards, an idea well before its time that was summarily rejected. However, as we see in the next chapter, towards the end of the decade trade unions did become recognized.
The 1920s also saw the last splutterings of the policy of using the railways as a form of defence, with the renewal of the construction of military railways. The most ambitious railway built during this period was the famous line up the Khyber Pass. Russia was, again, the main potential casus belli, despite the fact that its ignominious defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 demonstrated all too obviously that the notion of waging a distant war using a very long single-track railway line was a non-starter. The inadequacy of the recently built Transsiberian in that conflict, which left the Russians short of troops and materiel, should have put an end to British concerns over the potential invasion of India from the north-west.
The doves, who made precisely that point, did prevail for a while. The government refused to accede to demands for continued construction of railways in the North-West Frontier by the Viceroy, Lord Minto, a hawkish supporter of military expansion (his most famous quote was ‘The Raj will not disappear in India as long as the British race remains what it is, because we shall fight for the Raj as hard as we have ever fought’), who replaced the more measured Curzon in 1905. In its reply, the government dismissed the notion of aggression from Russia, as quoted in Stuart Sweeney’s book on Indian military railways: ‘Afghanistan was now “as undesirable from the Russian point of view as from our own” since it would tie down resources while yielding little. If railways no longer deterred Russian aggression in Afghanistan, nor improved internal security with hostile Afghan tribesmen on the Indian border, [the report] suggested that the external defence rationale for Indian railways was dead by 1906.’36
Not so. The hawks eventually prevailed thanks to yet another conflict with Afghanistan, straight after the First World War, which gave the more bellicose members of the government the chance to resurrect their pet project. There were in fact 300 passes through the mountains of the North-West Frontier, and some particularly combative generals had wanted railways constructed up all of them. The most obvious gap in the potential defences against a hostile Afghanistan was the Khyber Pass, which was the most direct trade route between India and central Asia via Kabul, and was in fact part of the old Silk Road.
As we saw in Chapter 5, several railways ran up to the Indo-Afghani border and the hope among the more optimistic hawks was that, this time, a railway could be built right into Afghanistan. A survey of the Khyber Pass in 1890 had concluded that it was impassable, but in 1901 the North Western Railway, which was a state-owned company created in 1886 by merging the various railways that were mostly in what is now Pakistan, built a line to Jamrud, the entrance to the Pass. Construction actually started in 1905, but progress was slow and an alliance with Russia meant there was no longer a political imperative to continue the work. Consequently, in 1909, the whole scheme was abandoned and the twenty miles which had been laid were torn up in order for the material to be recycled.
However, the Third Afghan War, which started in 1919, and the fear of expansionary policies by the Bolshevik government which came to power in 1917 renewed interest in the line. A military surveyor, Colonel (later Sir) Gordon Hearn, was despatched to examine the best potential alignment for a railway and, despite previous doubts about the impossibility of the task, he found a route suitable for a single-track broad-gauge railway. It was to be built entirely through tribal territory, officially designated as the Khyber Agency, ‘under the care of the Political Agent of the Khyber where there was in those days no law but tribal custom, and where human life and property were lightly esteemed’.37 Not only was the terrain difficult, but it was, too, a period when the local tribes were likely to be particularly hostile given the war.
The risk of attack was largely allayed by the clever ploy of hiring local people to build the line and they proved to be highly efficient and effective workers. As a result, many enriched themselves from the high wages paid to persuade them to work, and apart from the occasional dispute, often the result of historic inter-tribal conflicts, there was little trouble. Construction of the line, though, was a heroic enterprise involving the laying of tracks through inhospitable country with few local resources, except, bizarrely, flows of water in sufficient number to ensure workers had enough to assuage their thirst and, later, refill locomotive tanks. Construction was given continued impetus by the further bellicose propaganda back home. A reporter for a noted illustrated paper warned of the ‘Russian menace’ and the stealthy advance of the Bolsheviks, who were allegedly secretly building a railway in Afghanistan. There were even photographs, but the only problem was that they were, in fact, pictures of the Khyber Railway, itself under construction.
The sheer statistics of the legendary railway hardly do justice to the scale of the achievement. The thirty-two-mile line required thirty-four tunnels with a total length of three miles, as well as ninety-two bridges, and there were four reversing stations, where, as on the line through the ghats built nearly three quarters of a century previously, trains had to be driven along a track hewn out of the mountain towards a precipice protected only by a flimsy buffer stop, and then reversed up to continue climbing (or descending). The average gradient was 2 per cent – a rise of nearly 2,000 feet in twenty-one miles, enough to tax the strength of the locomotives and the skill of the drivers. The line included six sections of double track where trains could pass each other, as well as extensive sidings and modern signalling to ensure its viability as a troop carrier.
The railway was completed to Landi Kotal, the top of the pass, in November 1925, when a lavish ceremony was held, marred only by the absence of the Viceroy as a result of illness, and the following year the railway was continued a couple of kilometres down to Landi Khana. However, it is unclear whether tracks were ever laid right up to the customs post at Torkham, possibly due to opposition from the local Afghani ruler. The importance of the enterprise can be judged by the fact that the heir to the throne, the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VIII), visited the region during construction of the line.
The reason for this massive deployment of resources remained unclear. Even P. S. A. Berridge, the engineer in charge, who later wrote a book on the railways of the North-West Frontier, was pretty gloomy, admitting that he had probably wasted his time and the government’s money, though that, rightly, made him no less proud of the achievement: ‘The Khyber Railway was the last of the great railway constructions undertaken on the frontier during the British Raj. Whether the enormous cost was justified no one can ever tell, but it brought wealth to the tribesmen who helped to build it and proved that a railway could be constructed through the “most impossible” country.’38
It wasn’t his fault that the Khyber Railway was a misguided enterprise. Despite the huge cost of £1.6m (about £90m in today’s money) – which worked out at £50,000 per mile, ten times the average per mile spent on the Russian lines on the other side of Afghanistan, making it the most expensive railway ever built in India – it proved to be largely useless, and was pretty much a white elephant from the start. It was never used militarily and when opened never exceeded two trains per week, which were mainly patronized by the local tribespeople who had been appeased by a promise they would be able to use it for free. (Indeed when, in the 1990s, a private service, the Khyber Train Safari, was launched aimed at affluent adventurous tourists, the tribespeople had not forgotten this offer and many availed themselves of free journeys. The presence of these armed locals in traditional garb did not go down too well with the posh punters who had paid top dollar to ride on the famous Khyber Pass and were reported to be rather taken aback by their presence.)
The line closed in 1932 when a section of track was washed away, but was reopened by Pakistan in 1947, largely on military grounds. However, it shut again in 1982 because it was so uneconomic, given the high cost of maintaining the track and the paucity of passengers. An enterprising travel company began operating tourist trains in the mid-1990s, which ran till 2006 when damage to the line by floods, and the series of conflicts in the region which deterred even the hardiest of tourists, led to the line’s permanent closure. However, in 2015 the Pakistan government expressed interest in reviving the railway and commissioned a survey into its viability, but nothing is likely to come of this initiative while the political instability in the region continues.
The Khyber Pass may have been the most expensive of these military railways on the North-West Frontier, but the accolade of the least used goes to the Nushki Extension Railway, a 450-mile branch of the Sibi–Quetta line running westwards to Zahidan, fifty miles over the border into Persia (now Iran). The purpose of what became known as ‘The Lonely Line’, which started to be constructed during the First World War, was, like the other railways in the region, strategic, linking India with Persia in order to protect the eastern border of Persia, alongside the Russians, who were still allies at that point. The idea was that the troops based in Quetta would be transported rapidly westwards on the railway to ward off any invasion of Afghanistan by the Germans or Turks, and they would also be able to link up with British forces based in eastern Persia. There was also the suggestion that the line might carry oil from the Persian wells to India. It could have been the first railway to link the subcontinent with Europe, except for the fact that its terminus, Zahidan, was not connected to the rest of the Persian rail network (it was eventually linked in 2009, though through trains remain impossible because of the change in gauge).
The cost of its construction fell on the Government of India, though the British did pay for the section running into Iran. Around 100 miles of the line, between Quetta and Nushki, had been completed in the nineteenth century and work on the extension towards Persia was started by the British army in late 1916. Running in the desert south of the Afghan mountains, the terrain was flat, making tracklaying relatively easy, but the incessant sandstorms and the lack of water held up construction. Conditions in the treeless, parched desert were among the most difficult faced by any railway builders across the world. For eight months of the year, the temperature reaches 40°C or more every day and the workers on the line had to endure what the locals call the 120-day wind – which Berridge says ‘actually blows unceasingly for five months of the year [and] lashes the coarse sand so that it cuts the skin like a sand-blast’. He added: ‘The whole country is coated with sulphur dust, and water when it is obtainable is a concentrated solution of mixed common and Epsom salts.’39
The completion of the Nushki Extension Railway was delayed by a shortage of water and lack of equipment, and construction was eventually halted as a result of the end of the First World War and the Russian October 1917 revolution, which, in fact, changed the strategic objectives. Consequently, the line only reached Zahidan, its terminus in Persia, six years later, by which time not only was the war long over, but the Russians were no longer allies since the new Bolshevik regime had sued for peace with the Germans after the revolution. There was now a Soviet threat which the military used to justify building this remote railway despite the change in the global situation and their strategic objectives. Presumably, the hawks in the military argued that the line might be useful in a further conflict, given the fluidity of regional alliances, but, nevertheless, that seemed a thin excuse to justify the high cost and the operational difficulties.
There were only fourteen stations or, rather, halts, on the whole line and virtually no inhabitants to use them, apart from nomadic tribes. ‘The Lonely Line’ certainly deserved its moniker given that it traversed a region so remote that the railway company had to ensure it had a well-stocked buffet car in order to feed and water the passengers during the not infrequent occasions when the train broke down and had to await rescue.
The trains and their few passengers faced two main risks from the terrain and the climate. When there was rain, the whole year’s fall might occur in a few hours, which caused flash flooding sufficient to douse and extinguish a steam engine’s fire. Drivers had to carefully judge whether they would be able to plough through the pools of water with sufficient momentum or wait for them to recede. A slower but potentially worse risk was caused by the ‘marching sandhills’, known locally as do-reg. This is not a matter of a few small mounds of sand but rather ‘crescent shaped sandhills formed by the wind [which are] constantly on the move’.40 They move at up to 600 metres per year and consequently, at times, new tracks had to be laid to avoid the new mountains of sand covering the rails. The old tracks were left in situ so that the trains could return to them if the do-reg moved again. Occasionally, the marching sandhills covered the track so quickly that the train would have to stop and all the male passengers would be required to help dig it out or even relay the track. With remarkable foresight, the railway company left spare lengths of rails, shoes and sleepers alongside the line in readiness for such an emergency, probably making it the only railway in the world where paying passengers were required to help build the railway on which they were travelling.
The heroic effort of the Nushki’s construction was pretty much in vain. There was just one weekly train in each direction, which took forty hours, an average of 12 mph, for the journey, but the service only survived for a decade. A 140-mile section between Nok Kundi and Zahidan was dismantled in the 1930s because there seemed little point in keeping the train running given the paucity of passengers. However, this section was hastily relaid in 1940, as a result of the outbreak of the Second World War, and for a while during the conflict the Nushki Extension Railway was used for transporting tea and sulphur. It was also reopened because it was envisaged that the line might help transport supplies for the USSR via a back route through Persia, but in fact the materiel never arrived for transport on the railway and it was not used for this purpose. Taken over by Pakistan at Partition, the line, now called the Trans-Baluchistan, has survived and operates a service once a fortnight.
A rather more useful construction during the interwar period was the Kalabagh Bridge over the Indus, in what is now Pakistan, which took four years to build because of the width of the river and its rapid flow during the spring. Berridge was in no doubt about the value of what was the longest railway bridge built before Partition, which ‘affording permanent rail access to the fertile irrigated lands beyond the Indus and bringing better trading conditions to the men of the frontier, has played its part in harnessing the resource of nature to the benefits of mankind’. While a barrage had tamed the Indus downriver from the bridge, Berridge wrote that it was the railway which was ‘the agent of civilisation’, and enabled the conversion of ‘arid desert to rich fertile land under the vast irrigation schemes’, with the result that ‘No longer does the tribesman of the wild north-west have to go marauding to survive starvation.’41
However, the rapid growth and financial success of the railways during the 1920s was soon to be brought to an abrupt end by the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and the ensuing worldwide depression. While there would be no more crazy projects built for spurious military objectives, the downturn also spelled the end for the continuation of the greatly needed expansion programme that had seen many useful additions to the network in the interwar period. The economic crisis that lasted for much of the following decade hit India hard because of its reliance on exports and its lack of domestic industry.