A Branch Line To The Seaside

I check out of the Arya Mahal and walk down to the station; it is 10am and already the heat is building: the TOI forecasts 34.8 degrees with 93% humidity – I believe them. The Sambalpur-Puri Express is running late. I check the whiteboard behind the counter at Enquiries: expected 11.45 at platform 4 – an hour down on the 300km run from Sambalpur. I wait on the platform and smoke a Wills Classic while the WDS shifts rakes of coaches from one side of the station to the other. A WAP-4 pulls a military transport slowly through platform three; tanks, jeeps, armored personnel carriers and trucks lashed onto flat wagons; brake vans spread throughout heavy the train to help slow it down, Luggage-Cum-Guard’s vans full of troops bristling with weapons. Some of the soldiers have set up picnic tables beneath the barrels of the tanks’ guns, with cooler boxes of food and gas powered barbecues. The troop train is heading North – perhaps to the troubled Jammu-Kashmir region where Maoist extremists are waging a daily guerilla war against the state government.
I take my seat in the Chair Car of the express and leave Bhubaneswar behind a growling WDM-3 of the East Coast Railway – one of 16 divisional companies that Indian Railways is comprised of. Their names promise the romance of train travel in far away, exotic and rugged places: The North East Frontier Railway; The West Coast Railway; The South Central Railway. The scale is vast and it would take a lifetime to see it all: 63,000kms of track, 11,000 trains carrying nearly two million tons of freight and close to 14 million passengers a day. Only America's super-size railroad is bigger. The divisional names have a grandeur that was lost long ago in the United Kingdom when the Great Central Railway was abandoned and the London and North Eastern became just another anonymous part of British Rail; they are redolent of the Golden Age of railways, promising adventures Hull Trains, Heathrow Connect or Merseyrail could never hope to compete with. I stand on the baking platform at Khurda Road while we wait for a passenger train to clear the line down to Puri; the sky is a blazing blue, and the light breeze warm and damp. The WDM locks on the horns and the train leaves the Howrah-Chennai mainline and joins the 43km single track branch to the shores of the Bay of Bengal. I could imagine I am traveling along a quaint Cornish branch line of the Great Western Railway if it wasn’t for the coconut palms and paddy fields where there should be pastures and chestnut trees; the signals are old semaphores on latticed steel or solid wooden posts – their arms dropping to 45 degrees to signal ‘line clear' – just as you would have found on Brunel’s railway in the 1950s. But when you remember that Isambard Kingdom Brunel was consulting engineer to the East India Railway Company when railways first came here in 1862, the similarities should come as no surprise. It was Brunel who designed Kolkata’s Sealdah terminus, and the British owned Great Indian Peninsular Railway Company that ran the country’s first trains from Bombay to Thane behind three steam engines built in the Vulcan Foundry in Lancashire – Sultan, Sindh and Sahib. Sealdah is still in use today, as is the line to Thane – the original, modest wooden terminus at Bori Bunder now the burgeoning Mumbai CST.
I get off the train at the end of the line and walk into the sunshine and find a cycle-rickshaw to take me to the Ghanhara Hotel on CT Road. My room is clean, well furnished and spacious; I have a table and two chairs on the sitout (veranda), and I can walk through the leafy garden to the kitchen door and ask the cook to make me some dinner or breakfast, or help myself to drinks from the cooler outside. There is a roof-top terrace where I can sit with a cold Kingfisher and cool off in the breeze from the Bay of Bengal, and the garden is home to birds, bats, small darting lizards and tiny frogs. I leave my bag in my room and follow Waterworks Road to the back of the station; I buy a platform ticket and walk off the far end of the station and sit by the tracks in the shade of Banyan tree strung with lianas. A few locals pass and say ‘hello’, but I am otherwise alone. Across the four running-lines in front of me is the locomotive stabling point; a line-up of WAP-4 electrics, WAG-4-6Ps and WDM-2s and 3s. There doesn’t seem to be anyone around and there certainly is no security. I walk across the tracks and wander amongst the massive, towering engines; a door opens in the depot building and a railway man walks past without challenging me –" I am looking for the booking office. Could you help me please?" the confused and bewildered tourist clutching a map will ask.
The WDM-2 is old and battle-weary; the design dates from 1962 when ALCO imported the first of their pioneering locomotives from the United States, but this is undoubtedly one of the Indian produced ones made after DLW began building then in 1964. The WDM-3 is a later, more powerful version, and in better condition. The 2600hp WDM-2 could handle a 9 coach express in it’s day, but has been put out to pasture shunting stock from the carriage sidings to the station; the 3100hp WDM-3 still hauls 18 coach trains out on the mainline and can be found at the head of The Pearl City Express, The Black Diamond, The Grand Trunk Express, The Golden Temple Mail and countless others. I walk alongside the tracks to the level crossing on Waterworks Road, buy a bottle of water and watch as the old WDM-2 starts up and moves off the stabling point towards me; I take a photograph as it passes and listen with alarm to the shouts that come from the open cab window. I’m still on railway property where photography is forbidden. But the crew isn’t berating me, they’re calling: “Station? Station?” They’re offering me a lift. I cross over and climb up the forward steps, walk along the gangway past the heat, noise and hot, oily smell of the ALCO diesel engine and go into the cab.
The last time I sat in the Second man’s seat of a diesel was on the way to Esztergom from Budapest; that time it was the one of the rare, classic M61s of Hungarian Railways – another example of an American engined locomotive abroad. The M61 was preserved after withdrawal from service, but this WDM-2 will be cannibalized for spares and the remains scrapped before too much longer. It is dirty, smoky and dark inside the cab; and hot, too – easily 45 degrees. The sweat streams off me as I watch the driver throw the brakes off and pull the power-handle back to notch 2; we slowly begin to roll forward, the huge locomotive vibrating and slamming its weight onto the tracks. The chug of the ALCO engine is far louder inside the locomotive; I can feel each exhaust blast in the pit of my stomach. The driver shuts-off at notch 3 and we coast towards the station; I doubt this engine will ever see notch 8 and full power again. I thank the crew and walk through the carriage sidings to the platform edge. I didn’t expect for one moment that I’d actually get to ride in a WDM; so Indian Railways is not just RPF officers and endless prohibitions after all?
I take a cycle-rickshaw back to CT Road and ask for a Kingfisher in the Bravery Bar; it is a purely Indian place, a dingy concrete floored hole full of overweight local men swilling Yatari Black Label Strong and bottles of lethal Haywards 9000 Super Strong beer. They have to send a boy out to buy my Kingfisher; 10 minutes later he parks his bicycle by the door and places the bottle on the table before me. I ask to use the toilet: “Indian style. Is okay?” I am led through a door at the back of the bar and pointed to a pile of garbage in one corner of the kitchen; the old Indian woman wiping a chipped Formica tabletop with chopped onions piled on it is shooed away; as I urinate on the kitchen floor, I watch flies swarming over the food and the dirty rag cloth the woman has left unattended on the table.
I eat a meal of grilled tuna, rice and vegetable masala in the Ghandhara’s garden and then take a bottle of Kingfisher up to the roof and watch the moon rise over the Bay of Bengal. Tomorrow, I will hire a motorbike and explore Puri and the countryside around; tonight, I am going to drink a Kingfisher beer for the engine crew and the old, white and orange WDM-2.