Place · pass & railway tunnel · Pakistan
Khojak Pass & the Chaman line
The pass north-west of Quetta that leads to Chaman and on to Kandahar, and the place where imperial anxiety about Afghanistan was turned into engineering. After the Second Afghan War the British drove a tunnel nearly four kilometres long under the Khojak at Shelabagh, finished in 1891 and still the longest railway tunnel in Pakistan, so that troops could be moved toward Kandahar at speed. The line was laid as far as Chaman and then deliberately stopped at the frontier.
- Function
- Travel & migration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 30.850, 66.567
Worth knowing
The tunnel's mouth was printed on Pakistan's five-rupee note, which means the most reproduced image of Balochistan for decades was a hole bored through a mountain to invade somewhere else.
Connections (3)
- In the same set asQuetta
Quetta has two gates and they point opposite ways. The Bolan drops south-east to Sindh and the Indus; the Khojak climbs north-west to Chaman and Kandahar. Holding the valley between them is what the whole British position in Balochistan was for, and both were driven through with railway engineering in the 1880s — the Bolan up the gorge, the Khojak under the mountain in a four-kilometre tunnel. The city in the middle was a cantonment before it was anything else.
- In the same set asThe Khyber Pass Railway
Two tunnels bored toward Afghanistan and neither reaching it. The Khojak, finished in 1891, runs nearly four kilometres under the pass above Chaman so that troops could be moved quickly toward Kandahar; the Khyber Pass Railway, built 1920–25, climbs from Jamrud to Landi Kotal through thirty-four tunnels and two reversing zig-zags to put guns at the head of that pass. Both lines stop at the frontier by design. They are the most expensive things the Raj built in the north-west, and they were built to be ready rather than to be used.
- Route adjacencyKandahar
Kandahar and Quetta are one road with a border on it, and the Khojak is the mountain in between. The British tunnelled under it in 1888–91 and laid rail to Chaman precisely so that an army could be at Kandahar in days rather than weeks, which is what the Second Afghan War had shown they could not do. The line stopped at the frontier and was never extended. The road still carries the transit trade, and the fruit that comes down it is why Quetta became a fruit market.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Khojak Pass” and “Khojak Tunnel”. North Western Railway construction records; Imperial Gazetteer of India, Baluchistan volume.
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