WAG, WAM, WAP
I have breakfast on the veranda in the morning sunshine; it is 8am and already hot. I write egg scramble, coffee black pot on the notepad outside the kitchen door, tear off my order and then pass it in to the cook. The kitchen is a small, dark room crammed with bottles of sauces, bowls of chopped onions, chillis and fruit; two gas rings occupy one corner, a small fridge stands against the back wall beneath the hot water geyser and the warm aroma of fresh, simmering masala hangs in the air. Food that is conjured from this dim, tiny space is remarkably good. The garden is quiet and peaceful; the other guests’ “guten Morgens” and “Bonjours” unobtrusive and considerate in the surrounding tranquility. The houseboys sweep the verandas and paths with foxtail brushes, water the banana trees and palms and carry buckets to the rooftop terrace for the potted plants; barefoot, they make almost no sound as they pad by my table.
I spend an hour at the internet café across the street, leaving my trainers amid the collection of flip-flops and sandals outside the door and then walk up Chankra Tirtha – CT – Road to find my transport for the day. I give 10 Rupees to the old man with polio in both legs who hand pedals his tricycle up and down all day in search of alms, then test-ride a maroon Yamaha RX100 from the first “Motorbike On Hire” lock-up I find. The forks are twisted in the yolks, the gears jump into neutral under power and arcing points cause a misfire and loss of power at high revs. The black RX100 at the next shop revs freely through all four gears and steers straight when I take my hands from the bars; I fill out a photocopied rental form with some sketchy and partially inaccurate information and exchange 200 Rupees for the Yamaha’s keys. Formalities such as producing a driving licence, or entering my passport number in the agreement are overlooked by both parties.
I park the bike outside the Ghandra Hotel and change into boots and jeans, cover myself with sunscreen and collect my sunglasses and hat. I pull my daypack over my shoulders, kick start the Yamaha, pull the peak of my baseball cap a little further down and then set off into chaotic traffic towards Waterworks Road. Potholed and patched tarmac gives way to sand, loose gravel, pools of thick, oozing mud; red dust and compacted earth. The bike fishtails and squirms, the back wheel sliding, the front hopping over large stones and chunks of shattered concrete and side-stepping alarmingly. Pedestrians, monkeys, dogs, rickshaws, cows, scooters, huge Tata trucks and herds of goats come at me from all directions. The rules of the road are: give way to rickshaws on roundabouts and use your horn when overtaking or something comes too close – or looks like it might. Otherwise, take any available gap, space or part of the road – left or right – and try to miss everything else. I fight my way along the sandy lane to the main road at a snails pace, skimming my boots over the dust for balance, wrenching the Yamaha upright when it slides in the wet mud. Waterworks road is a wide, level tarmac strip running parallel to the carriage sidings alongside Puri station; I let the tyres dry off and then open the throttle wide. The little two-stroke engine is eager; I take it into the power band in every gear and settle into a 60mph cruise. The locals are stunned as I whip past their rickshaws and scooters with a blast of my horn, as long and urgent as a WDM’s. I become part of the mass of traffic at the level crossing gates and watch the familiar WDM-2 push its train of empty coaches back into the station, cross, pull up outside the main bus stand, light a Wills Classic and wait. My map covers the town center and goes no further than the end of Grand Road. A purple and yellow Leyland bus festooned with chrome trims, petal garlands and intricate hand-painted designs rumble out of the station; a homemade sign in the windscreen says Bhubaneswar: I follow it
Once on the main road out of town, I swing the Yamaha far over to the left and look up the side of the bus: clear. I pull out to the middle of the road, check the right side, look back over my shoulder, drop down into third and wind the throttle back. Heads and waving hands hang out of the open windows as I scream past; I hear shouts and cheers, “Heys!” and “Halos!” as I move up into fourth and leave the bus behind in a trail of hazy blue two-stoke exhaust.
I pull off the road after four or five miles and follow a lane of red dust through paddy fields and palm stands to a level crossing near a mud-and-thatch village. The villagers look over as I park the bike on it’s center stand and sit in the shade of a coconut palm; I wave to them and they go back to the business of rural life and subsistence farming. It is far hotter inland without the cooling sea breeze; my socks are damp inside my boots, my shirt drenched within minutes of stopping. The still air carries the muted sound of leaves being pounded in the village, birdsong and the faint call of a kite circling far overhead: otherwise it is silent.
I hear the WAP-4 long before I see it round the distant bend in the railway line; it passes over the crossing at 50mph, air horns blaring, people clinging in every doorway of the 16 coach passenger train. Further up the line, a woman who is collecting discarded plastic water bottles from the line side crouches in the ballast as the train rushes by, the turbulence snatching and tugging at her turquoise sari. Sunlight glints off the engine’s huge headlight, set high above the barred windscreens, and bleaches the flat front of the cab, the two zigzag bolts of electricity painted in pale orange on it’s white face becoming almost indiscernible. There is something indefinably Gallic in the WAP’s appearance – perhaps it’s proportions, the high center headlight or the lattice of ducting and insulators on the roof between the twin pantographs (the scissor-like frames that reach up to the overhead power line) – and it wouldn’t look out of place at Paris Gare Du Nord or heading for the Riviera with Le Mistral.
It is a passenger only electric locomotive – unlike the WDM, which is a diesel designed to haul both passenger and freight trains. There is a bewildering variety of classes and types of engine on Indian Railways, but each has its own , logical definition. WAGs, WAPs, WAMs; WDGs, WDPs, WDMs; WAG-4s, WDM-2s and WDM-3s. What are they? What do all these letters and numbers mean? Simple: ‘W’ for wide gauge – the 5’6” Imperial Broad gauge; ‘A’ for AC electric; ‘D’ for diesel. ‘P’ denotes a passenger locomotive, ‘G’ a goods, or freight engine, while ‘M’ means mixed – suitable for both goods and passenger use. Once you know what sort of train your locomotive can pull, the only other major consideration is: how powerful is it? That is what the number following the three letter designation will tell you: the higher the number, the more powerful the engine. So, a WDM-3 is more powerful than a WDM-2, but has less power than a WAG-4; both the WDMs can be used on any type of train, but the WAG-4 is confined to goods. And of course, all three are wide, or broad gauge. The same system applies to the two other gauges found in India: metre gauge is denoted by ‘Y’ – probably derived from the rough measurement of a yard – and ‘N’ means narrow gauge. A YDM, then, is a metre gauge diesel locomotive that can be used for both passenger and freight: simple, logical. There are very few metre gauge lines left, and those are steadily being converted to broad gauge; the three major narrow gauge lines that remain serve the hill stations of Darjeeling, Matheran and Shimla (the famous Queen Of Hill Stations, Ooty, is connected by a metre gauge line) and their popularity with tourists gaurantees their survival.
So, what do a WDG and a WAM have in common, and where do they differ?
Nothing else will pass by until the WAP-4 clears the single line up to the junction at Khurda Road, so I kick start the Yamaha and ride back into town. I park up on Grand Road and walk up to Jagganath temple. Both sides of the wide street of decaying colonial buildings is lined with stalls selling garish and tacky souvenirs. The open shop fronts and warrens of the makeshift Ganj ( market ) are awash with gaudy pictures of Lord Jagganath in cheap frames, holographic bumper stickers of his brother Balabhadra and four foot tall plastic statues of his sister Subhadra, shoddily painted in a clashing mix of lurid colours. Yatris squat at the temple gates to have their heads shaved with a blunt, straight blade razor before entering; beggars, touts and hawkers crowd in, every one of them wanting something. The temple is out of bounds to Westerners, so I climb to the viewing platform in the library opposite; I am asked to sign the visitors’ book and write the amount I am going to donate in the right hand column. The figures across the page are astronomical – hundreds, thousands of Rupees – and completely false: 50 Rupees has become 500, twenty has multiplied into 2000. The additional zeros are in a different hand and sometimes a different coloured ink. The view of the temple is unspectacular, and I see no sign of any of the 5000 monkeys that live inside it’s walls, terrorizing and robbing the pilgrims. The temple authorities latest attempt to remove the troublesome monkeys involved what was described in the TOI as “a group of seven skilled monkey-catchers from the Hill Khadia Mankadia Development Agency”, who’s stated aim was “to catch at least 1000 monkeys” during their week-long visit, using nets and ropes, and working at night when the daytime crowds have left. That would mean each of them would have to catch at least 20 monkeys a night, using only nets and ropes - in pitch darkness? On the first night, they managed to catch a total of eight between them; by the second night, they have been sacked and are making their unhappy way home to Mayurbhanj
I retrieve the Yamaha from its parking spot, ride down VIP Road, along CT Road and drop it off at the lock-up. I leave a deposit and tell the shopkeeper to make sure there’s enough fuel in it for tomorrow. I walk down the sandy lane towards the fishing village; as soon as the pye dogs see or scent me they begin howling and rise from the shade of bushes and lean-tos. It is disconcerting: they ignore the locals but follow me at a distance, yapping and baying to each other – running the unwelcome visitor out of town. I turn right into a narrow passage that leads down to the beach and stop dead. Lying in a pile of rubbish and rotting food at my feet is a thin, trembling mongrel, foam and saliva dripping from its snarling, bared canines. It’s eyes are filled with fear and demented hatred; it tries to lunge for me but is too weak in the final stages of rabies to do anything but collapse onto it’s side. I back away and take the lane on the opposite side of the road and find the Bravery Beer Parlor. Plastic chairs and dirty Formica tables are set up in the four, square rooms off the veranda of what must once have been a small housing block; the straggly, narrow strip of garden at the front is littered with empty whisky, rum and beer bottles, the rooms filthy, fetid and flyblown. I order a Kingfisher and sit beneath the ceiling fan in one of the pokey rooms; the floor is covered in bits of food and cigarette ends, the table ring-stained and sticky with spilled drink, the walls covered with posters advertising Zhedong 12000 and Super Stud beers, both promising virility and oblivion in equal measures. The seediest Hungarian bar, the most squalid Slovakian booth pale in comparison to the Bravery Beer Parlor.
I walk back to my hotel and sit on the veranda with a Kingfisher; the cook brings out a tuna steak and I agree it is very fresh, and that it would be best grilled and served with vegetable puloa and green salad.
A small lizard clings upside down on the bathroom ceiling and watches me bucket-shower; I turn the overhead fan to the lowest setting, switch off the light and listen to the cacophony of nocturnal life in the garden outside my window.
Tomorrow, I will book a ticket for the Howrah-Chennai Mail; after that, who knows where I will find myself?
I spend an hour at the internet café across the street, leaving my trainers amid the collection of flip-flops and sandals outside the door and then walk up Chankra Tirtha – CT – Road to find my transport for the day. I give 10 Rupees to the old man with polio in both legs who hand pedals his tricycle up and down all day in search of alms, then test-ride a maroon Yamaha RX100 from the first “Motorbike On Hire” lock-up I find. The forks are twisted in the yolks, the gears jump into neutral under power and arcing points cause a misfire and loss of power at high revs. The black RX100 at the next shop revs freely through all four gears and steers straight when I take my hands from the bars; I fill out a photocopied rental form with some sketchy and partially inaccurate information and exchange 200 Rupees for the Yamaha’s keys. Formalities such as producing a driving licence, or entering my passport number in the agreement are overlooked by both parties.
I park the bike outside the Ghandra Hotel and change into boots and jeans, cover myself with sunscreen and collect my sunglasses and hat. I pull my daypack over my shoulders, kick start the Yamaha, pull the peak of my baseball cap a little further down and then set off into chaotic traffic towards Waterworks Road. Potholed and patched tarmac gives way to sand, loose gravel, pools of thick, oozing mud; red dust and compacted earth. The bike fishtails and squirms, the back wheel sliding, the front hopping over large stones and chunks of shattered concrete and side-stepping alarmingly. Pedestrians, monkeys, dogs, rickshaws, cows, scooters, huge Tata trucks and herds of goats come at me from all directions. The rules of the road are: give way to rickshaws on roundabouts and use your horn when overtaking or something comes too close – or looks like it might. Otherwise, take any available gap, space or part of the road – left or right – and try to miss everything else. I fight my way along the sandy lane to the main road at a snails pace, skimming my boots over the dust for balance, wrenching the Yamaha upright when it slides in the wet mud. Waterworks road is a wide, level tarmac strip running parallel to the carriage sidings alongside Puri station; I let the tyres dry off and then open the throttle wide. The little two-stroke engine is eager; I take it into the power band in every gear and settle into a 60mph cruise. The locals are stunned as I whip past their rickshaws and scooters with a blast of my horn, as long and urgent as a WDM’s. I become part of the mass of traffic at the level crossing gates and watch the familiar WDM-2 push its train of empty coaches back into the station, cross, pull up outside the main bus stand, light a Wills Classic and wait. My map covers the town center and goes no further than the end of Grand Road. A purple and yellow Leyland bus festooned with chrome trims, petal garlands and intricate hand-painted designs rumble out of the station; a homemade sign in the windscreen says Bhubaneswar: I follow it
Once on the main road out of town, I swing the Yamaha far over to the left and look up the side of the bus: clear. I pull out to the middle of the road, check the right side, look back over my shoulder, drop down into third and wind the throttle back. Heads and waving hands hang out of the open windows as I scream past; I hear shouts and cheers, “Heys!” and “Halos!” as I move up into fourth and leave the bus behind in a trail of hazy blue two-stoke exhaust.
I pull off the road after four or five miles and follow a lane of red dust through paddy fields and palm stands to a level crossing near a mud-and-thatch village. The villagers look over as I park the bike on it’s center stand and sit in the shade of a coconut palm; I wave to them and they go back to the business of rural life and subsistence farming. It is far hotter inland without the cooling sea breeze; my socks are damp inside my boots, my shirt drenched within minutes of stopping. The still air carries the muted sound of leaves being pounded in the village, birdsong and the faint call of a kite circling far overhead: otherwise it is silent.
I hear the WAP-4 long before I see it round the distant bend in the railway line; it passes over the crossing at 50mph, air horns blaring, people clinging in every doorway of the 16 coach passenger train. Further up the line, a woman who is collecting discarded plastic water bottles from the line side crouches in the ballast as the train rushes by, the turbulence snatching and tugging at her turquoise sari. Sunlight glints off the engine’s huge headlight, set high above the barred windscreens, and bleaches the flat front of the cab, the two zigzag bolts of electricity painted in pale orange on it’s white face becoming almost indiscernible. There is something indefinably Gallic in the WAP’s appearance – perhaps it’s proportions, the high center headlight or the lattice of ducting and insulators on the roof between the twin pantographs (the scissor-like frames that reach up to the overhead power line) – and it wouldn’t look out of place at Paris Gare Du Nord or heading for the Riviera with Le Mistral.
It is a passenger only electric locomotive – unlike the WDM, which is a diesel designed to haul both passenger and freight trains. There is a bewildering variety of classes and types of engine on Indian Railways, but each has its own , logical definition. WAGs, WAPs, WAMs; WDGs, WDPs, WDMs; WAG-4s, WDM-2s and WDM-3s. What are they? What do all these letters and numbers mean? Simple: ‘W’ for wide gauge – the 5’6” Imperial Broad gauge; ‘A’ for AC electric; ‘D’ for diesel. ‘P’ denotes a passenger locomotive, ‘G’ a goods, or freight engine, while ‘M’ means mixed – suitable for both goods and passenger use. Once you know what sort of train your locomotive can pull, the only other major consideration is: how powerful is it? That is what the number following the three letter designation will tell you: the higher the number, the more powerful the engine. So, a WDM-3 is more powerful than a WDM-2, but has less power than a WAG-4; both the WDMs can be used on any type of train, but the WAG-4 is confined to goods. And of course, all three are wide, or broad gauge. The same system applies to the two other gauges found in India: metre gauge is denoted by ‘Y’ – probably derived from the rough measurement of a yard – and ‘N’ means narrow gauge. A YDM, then, is a metre gauge diesel locomotive that can be used for both passenger and freight: simple, logical. There are very few metre gauge lines left, and those are steadily being converted to broad gauge; the three major narrow gauge lines that remain serve the hill stations of Darjeeling, Matheran and Shimla (the famous Queen Of Hill Stations, Ooty, is connected by a metre gauge line) and their popularity with tourists gaurantees their survival.
So, what do a WDG and a WAM have in common, and where do they differ?
Nothing else will pass by until the WAP-4 clears the single line up to the junction at Khurda Road, so I kick start the Yamaha and ride back into town. I park up on Grand Road and walk up to Jagganath temple. Both sides of the wide street of decaying colonial buildings is lined with stalls selling garish and tacky souvenirs. The open shop fronts and warrens of the makeshift Ganj ( market ) are awash with gaudy pictures of Lord Jagganath in cheap frames, holographic bumper stickers of his brother Balabhadra and four foot tall plastic statues of his sister Subhadra, shoddily painted in a clashing mix of lurid colours. Yatris squat at the temple gates to have their heads shaved with a blunt, straight blade razor before entering; beggars, touts and hawkers crowd in, every one of them wanting something. The temple is out of bounds to Westerners, so I climb to the viewing platform in the library opposite; I am asked to sign the visitors’ book and write the amount I am going to donate in the right hand column. The figures across the page are astronomical – hundreds, thousands of Rupees – and completely false: 50 Rupees has become 500, twenty has multiplied into 2000. The additional zeros are in a different hand and sometimes a different coloured ink. The view of the temple is unspectacular, and I see no sign of any of the 5000 monkeys that live inside it’s walls, terrorizing and robbing the pilgrims. The temple authorities latest attempt to remove the troublesome monkeys involved what was described in the TOI as “a group of seven skilled monkey-catchers from the Hill Khadia Mankadia Development Agency”, who’s stated aim was “to catch at least 1000 monkeys” during their week-long visit, using nets and ropes, and working at night when the daytime crowds have left. That would mean each of them would have to catch at least 20 monkeys a night, using only nets and ropes - in pitch darkness? On the first night, they managed to catch a total of eight between them; by the second night, they have been sacked and are making their unhappy way home to Mayurbhanj
I retrieve the Yamaha from its parking spot, ride down VIP Road, along CT Road and drop it off at the lock-up. I leave a deposit and tell the shopkeeper to make sure there’s enough fuel in it for tomorrow. I walk down the sandy lane towards the fishing village; as soon as the pye dogs see or scent me they begin howling and rise from the shade of bushes and lean-tos. It is disconcerting: they ignore the locals but follow me at a distance, yapping and baying to each other – running the unwelcome visitor out of town. I turn right into a narrow passage that leads down to the beach and stop dead. Lying in a pile of rubbish and rotting food at my feet is a thin, trembling mongrel, foam and saliva dripping from its snarling, bared canines. It’s eyes are filled with fear and demented hatred; it tries to lunge for me but is too weak in the final stages of rabies to do anything but collapse onto it’s side. I back away and take the lane on the opposite side of the road and find the Bravery Beer Parlor. Plastic chairs and dirty Formica tables are set up in the four, square rooms off the veranda of what must once have been a small housing block; the straggly, narrow strip of garden at the front is littered with empty whisky, rum and beer bottles, the rooms filthy, fetid and flyblown. I order a Kingfisher and sit beneath the ceiling fan in one of the pokey rooms; the floor is covered in bits of food and cigarette ends, the table ring-stained and sticky with spilled drink, the walls covered with posters advertising Zhedong 12000 and Super Stud beers, both promising virility and oblivion in equal measures. The seediest Hungarian bar, the most squalid Slovakian booth pale in comparison to the Bravery Beer Parlor.
I walk back to my hotel and sit on the veranda with a Kingfisher; the cook brings out a tuna steak and I agree it is very fresh, and that it would be best grilled and served with vegetable puloa and green salad.
A small lizard clings upside down on the bathroom ceiling and watches me bucket-shower; I turn the overhead fan to the lowest setting, switch off the light and listen to the cacophony of nocturnal life in the garden outside my window.
Tomorrow, I will book a ticket for the Howrah-Chennai Mail; after that, who knows where I will find myself?
posted by Paul O'Halloran at 12:37 AM
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