Indian Imperial Broad

I am walking along the Main Bazar in Pahar Ganj towards New Delhi railway station when I feel a thump on my right shoulder; the blow propels me into a pile of brightly coloured woven blankets heaped on the dusty roadside by one of the hundreds of street traders. It is my first day in Delhi, and I have just been run over for the first time by a cycle-rickshaw. More embarrassed than injured, I dust myself off and rejoin the mass of people, cars, cows, scooters, and rickshaws squeezed into the narrow dusty street between the ramshackle buildings and the street vendors. The blaring horns, noise, smells, fumes and dust are awe inspiring; the random and conflicting trajectories of pedestrians, cattle, and traffic is bewildering.
Since leaving Hungary in early November I have stayed with my sister in a quintessential Cotswold village on the Thames, where seeing the postman peddling his bright red bicycle around the lanes is something of note. The teashop at Kelmscott, Blackwell's in Oxford, and discovering the simple pleasure of gardening have been welcome respite from week upon week of railway journeys in central Europe; but they have not prepared me in the least for three months in India. Could anything?
Nairobi is quiet and conservative when compared to Delhi - calm, peaceful, ordered; Capetown and Harare quaint, relaxed, uncrowded.
I dodge through the heaving traffic at the junction opposite the station, skimming off auto-rickshaws, missing buses and bicycles by fractions of an inch, stumbling in potholes and breathing blue diesel fumes and dust. I buy a 3 Rupee platform ticket and a timetable that is as thick as a coffee-table book: it contains every major train in India, from Amritsar in the far north of Punjab on the Pakistan border to Rameshwaram at the bottom of Tamil Nadu a few kilometers across the Gulf of Mannar from Sri Lanka. It would take a year to explore it all, but for the next three months this book will be the blueprint for my railway travels around the subcontinent.
I sit on a bale of cotton at the end of plateform (not "platform") 16, surrounded by hundreds of boxes, parcels, and other bales of cloth - and some very inquisitive locals - and watch a huge WDM diesel waiting to leave with a twenty-plus carriage passenger train. Indian railways come in different sizes; there are narrow gauge lines in the hill states, and broad and meter gauge lines elsewhere. There is a whole litany between the width of two rails: Bosnian Gauge for 2ft 5 and 7/8in; Supreme Metric Narrow is 1000mm wide, while Suez Walhalla Whitfield (people? places?) sit 2ft 6in apart. My favorite is Decauville Portable Narrow: not because the rails are exactly 1ft 11 and 5/8in distant, but for the mental picture of someone picking them up and walking away with them. The WDM diesel runs on 5ft 6in Imperial Broad gauge - the standard for Indian mainlines - and as I circle in my timetable train number 2004 departing New Delhi at 6.15 in the morning for Lucknow, the driver sounds a long blast of the airhorns to signal departure, drowning out all other noise and leaving my ears ringing and feeling strangely pressurised. My train will be a Shatabdi Express - fast, air-conditioned, expensive at 700 Rupees - and will take nearly 8 hours to reach Lucknow. It will be a far cry from the wooden slatted seats and barred windows of the passenger train. He lowers and waves a green flag from the cab window and moves the throttle to notch 1 as people dash across the plateform and tracks and climb onto the train, clinging in the open doorways, faces crammed against the barred windows, imprisoned in the dark, packed coaches. The WDM opens up with a growl and slides the train out of the station, the airhorns blaring every few seconds, a dictat of the bureaucratic railway rules: too few warning blasts would be noted and the driver disciplined.
I go to the foreigners Booking Office on the first floor above the Public Grievances Cell and The superintendent Of Parcel Bookings office and fill out a booking/cancellation of booking form for my train. I sit on a battered brown vinyl settee and wait to be called to the agents desk. My passport and visa details are entered into an MS-DOS era computer, along with my name, age, sex, and address, and once I have produced an Encashment Certificate I exchange a wad of Rupees for my ticket.
I leave the station and take an auto-rickshaw to Connaught Place; the driver carves his way through the anarchic traffic using his tinny sounding horn and occasionally the brakes, and I am stunned into silence by the frightening near misses and last minute swerves to avoid head-on collisions. I find a small restaurant behind the colonnaded circle and eat some dal and bread, then walk to a bar for a Kingfisher beer - dutch courage for the rickshaw ride back to my small, unclean, budget hotel.