His stories instruct and entertain, bringing the past of Indian Railways alive in the present. Did you know that India's first steam engine never ran on tracks and was actually used to run driving mills in a factory? That the maximum speed of the first commercial train in India was 4.5 miles/hour?

This handbook provides an indispensable reference guide to most aspects of the history of India’s railways. The secondary literature is surveyed, primary sources identified, statistical and cartographic data discussed, and a massive bibliography made available.

This book commemorates 150 years of railways in India. Introduced under colonial rule in the second half of the nineteenth century, the railways soon embraced the length and breadth of India bringing with it rapid political, economic, ecological and cultural changes. The articles in this book explore the impact of this technological phenomenon from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. From early railway thinking in renaissance Bengal, to railway policing in Uttar Pradesh and issues of management to railway themes in literature, the writers in this volume reveal the world of the railways in all its exciting facets. The photo essay invokes the nostalgic world of steam with a series of evocative images. In the twenty-first century, the ever expanding horizon of the railways continues to draw in people and goods in the third largest railway network in the world.

Lines of the Nation radically recasts the history of the Indian railways, which have long been regarded as vectors of modernity and economic prosperity. From the design of carriages to the architecture of stations, employment hierarchies, and the construction of employee housing, Laura Bear explores the new public spaces and social relationships created by the railway bureaucracy. She then traces their influence on the formation of contemporary Indian nationalism, personal sentiments, and popular memory. Her probing study challenges entrenched beliefs concerning the institutions of modernity and capitalism by showing that these rework older idioms of social distinction and are legitimized by forms of intimate, affective politics. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research in the company town at Kharagpur and at the Eastern Railway headquarters in Kolkata (Calcutta), Bear focuses on how political and domestic practices among workers became entangled with the moralities and archival technologies of the railway bureaucracy and illuminates the impact of this history today. The bureaucracy has played a pivotal role in the creation of idioms of family history, kinship, and ethics, and its special categorization of Anglo-Indian workers still resonates. Anglo-Indians were formed as a separate railway caste by Raj-era racial employment and housing policies, and other railway workers continue to see them as remnants of the colonial past and as a polluting influence. The experiences of Anglo-Indians, who are at the core of the ethnography, reveal the consequences of attempts to make political communities legitimate in family lines and sentiments. Their situation also compels us to rethink the importance of documentary practices and nationalism to all family histories and senses of relatedness. This interdisciplinary anthropological history throws new light not only on the imperial and national past of South Asia but also on the moral life of present technologies and economic institutions.

The fascinating story of the network that made modern India The railways brought modernity to India. Its vast network connected the far corners of the subcontinent, making travel, communication and commerce simpler than ever before. Even more importantly, the railways played a large part in the making of the nation: by connecting historically and geographically disparate regions and people, it forever changed the way Indians lived and thought, and eventually made a national identity possible. This engagingly written, anecdotally told history captures the immense power of a business behemoth as well as the romance of train travel; tracing the growth of the railways from the 1830s (when the first plans were made) to Independence, Bibek Debroy and his co-authors recount how the railway network was built in India and how it grew to become a lifeline that still weaves the nation together. This latest volume in The Story of Indian Business series will delight anyone interested in finding out more about the Indian Railways.

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, railways became increasingly important in the lives of a growing number of Indians. While allowing millions to collectively experience the endemic discomforts of third-class travel, the public opportunities for proximity and contact created by railways simultaneously compelled colonial society to confront questions about exclusion, difference, and community. It was not only passengers, however, who were affected by the transformations that railways wrought. Even without boarding a train, one could see railway tracks and embankments reshaping familiar landscapes, realise that train schedules represented new temporal structures, fear that spreading railway links increased the reach of contagion, and participate in new forms of popular politics focused around railway spaces. Tracks of Change explores how railway technology, travel, and infrastructure became increasingly woven into everyday life in colonial India, how people negotiated with the growing presence of railways, and how this process has shaped India's history.