Place · mountain railway · India
Mountain railways: Darjeeling
The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, opened in 1881 on a two-foot gauge, climbing about two thousand metres in eighty-eight kilometres by six loops and five Z-reverses rather than by tunnels, because tunnels cost more than track. It was built to carry tea down to the plains and planters and officials up.
- Date
- 1881
- Function
- Travel & migration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 27.040, 88.260
Worth knowing
The Batasia loop and the Agony Point curve are the tightest on the line, and at Ghum it reaches the highest station in India at 2,258 metres. It was the first of the three mountain railways to be inscribed, in 1999, and it still runs steam on part of the route with locomotives built before 1930.
Connections (5)
- Trade routeChhatrapati Shivaji Terminus
Victoria Terminus is the head of the network that reorganised Indian distance — a journey from Bombay to Calcutta went from months to days — and the mountain railways branch off it to reach the hill stations where the government went in summer. The main line was built for cotton, troops and famine relief; the branches were built so that officials could escape the heat, which is a fair summary of colonial priorities.
- Architectural modelNilgiri Mountain Railway
Darjeeling climbs two thousand metres on a two-foot gauge by loops and zigzags because tunnelling was too expensive; the Nilgiri line uses a rack and pinion on the Coonoor gradient, the only one in India. Two engineering answers to the same problem, thirty years and two thousand kilometres apart, and both still working with steam on parts of the route.
- In the same set asKalka–Shimla Railway
The Mountain Railways of India were inscribed in three stages — Darjeeling in 1999, the Nilgiri in 2005, Kalka-Shimla in 2008 — as one property with three components, and the three use three different solutions to the same problem: loops and Z-reverses, an Abt rack and pinion, and a hundred and three tunnels. All were built to move British officials and their cargo uphill.
- Route adjacencyViceregal Lodge, Shimla
The hill stations and the mountain railways are one policy in two forms. Shimla, Darjeeling and Ooty existed because the administration and the planters moved uphill in summer; the Kalka-Shimla, Darjeeling and Nilgiri lines were built to carry them and their files. All three railways are now World Heritage and none of them is a commercially viable service.
- Died atSister Nivedita
Sister Nivedita died at Darjeeling on 13 October 1911 at the age of forty-three, during a hill-station retreat after years of hard work in Calcutta that had broken her health. Her last words were reportedly 'The boat is sinking but I shall yet see the sun rise.' She was cremated at Darjeeling the next day with the Buddhist and Hindu rites her will had specified, and her ashes were taken to Belur Math where her samadhi beside Vivekananda's is now a Ramakrishna Mission pilgrimage.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Darjeeling Himalayan Railway”. UNESCO World Heritage nomination file for the Mountain Railways of India (1999); Indian Railways heritage directorate records.
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