No romance in more of the same

I have for you in this book the story of making of Train 18, the first indigenous semi-high speed train of India, a modern train set. This was the first time that our country got a fully home-grow modern rolling stock, i.e., a railway vehicle for which the concept to design to engineering to manufacture to validation & testing was done entirely in India at the Integral Coach Factory ICF), Chennai. This is not a story of one man alone, it is the story of a dedicated team of Indians telling you that we in India can also do it.

I have been a railwayman for life. I come from a railway family. I stayed with my parents in railway colonies in small cities till I was packed off for intermediate education to a boarding college in Lucknow. I grew up among trains and railway stations. Later, after flitting from Institute of Technology, Kanpur to University of Roorkee in the first year of engineering, I joined the Indian Railways’ Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Jamalpur, Bihar, as a Special Class Railway Apprentice on way to serve Indian Railways (IR) as a gazetted Class I officer of the Indian Railways’ Service of Mechanical Engineers. After joining Indian Railways as an Assistant Engineer in 1981, I continued in the same service till my superannuation. So that is what I am, a railwayman forever.

IR has a long history and legacy of close to 170 years and it is a subject of a great deal of romance. Can you remain unmoved by the unmatched romance of Indian Railways? Can you forget your train journeys as a child? Leave the aisle, a train fenestra beckons! You would remember the scramble for a window seat, a window through which the marvel of India and the magic of Indian way of life passed you by. Its stations and trains are a microcosm of India. The whole world drifted and streamed past your mesmerized eyes. Or even as an adult, the purpose of travelling on IR may well be to get to a certain place but you enjoy each step along the way; the journey becomes the objective, not the destination. Looking out at the unfolding drama in vast fields, village roads, wayside stations and so on, with the repetitive sound of the train in the background, what strikes you is not merely the magnificence of the machine or the romance of the moving train but also how IR affords you countless blicks of the alchemy of Indian cities, towns and villages.

Can you wipe out from your memory the snaking train and the great Indian drama? Not the staid scenes one would see in some developed countries but fascinating scenes of great excitement. Little joys. Pathos and poignancy. Trite and trivial but at once moving. Desolate here and crowded there. Tender and robust. Celebration now and mourning then. Struggle, exertion, indolence and sloth. The grind and the shirk. Simple yet complex. 

Can you ever fail to recall and revel in the settings of some of the most poignant love stories, nail-biting suspense thrillers, rib-tickling comedies and dulcet melodies, inextricably linked to, trains and railway stations?

It is a great leveller with the poorest to the richest waiting at a platform to catch the same train. Lifeline of the nation. Chugging by the day, whistling through the night, tunnelling through mountains or gently caressing the plains, stringing somnolent villages & bustling towns, stapling sprawling vistas ranging from esoteric to banal; images of trains streaming on ribbons of steel coursing through the length and breadth of the country, halting momentarily at stations. Travel experiences on IR are forged in popular psyche.

Railway stations and trains, indeed! Stations which are lent a sense of universality;  the yellow board calling out the name and confirming the identity of a place, a melange of colours in the sartorial preferences of cross sections of people, the humdrum of the trains and the cacophony of the vendors and recorded announcements broken occasionally by the shrill honks of locomotives, the wafting aroma of delectable local treats, and the porters donning the red shirts and brass buckles scurrying about their permanent habitat which they share with the ubiquitous railway officials like the Train Ticket Examiners and the Station Masters. These unique sights, sounds, colours and flavours at a station reflect the quintessential paradoxes and conformity of our country.

Shakespeare says through Antonio in Tempest, “Travellers never did lie though fools at home condemn them”. Yes, the IR travellers witness a fantastical and wondrous spectacle. And I indeed have no qualm in saying say that those who do not appreciate these wonders are perhaps blunted by a reality that cannot see beyond their narrow confines and conflicts.

What a transporter of people! Nearly nine billion passengers in a year; everyone on the planet travels IR at least once a year. And an organization which has assisted and sustained, over the last 165 years or so, first India’s awakening leading to unity and later its freedom and growth.

A great deal has been written about IR, and continue to get written, by writers of great repute and finesse. My book is not about this history and legacy. I can hardly have the pretension to match these luminary writers. It is about my despair and anguish. It is about the thought that notwithstanding all the conjury of our national transporter, one would always wonder as to why all its thousands of trains hardly look different form one another. In this despair lies the seed of the story and my narration thereafter.

I am sure this emotion of despair resonates with many of you. Indian Railways,

an institution which so many love and so many love to love, some love to hate,
and a few actually hate, but none like to ignore. This more of the same thought about our trains would certainly have come to you at some time or the other. It did to poet Bharat Bhushan Pant, in God knows what context, when he says:

Ek  jaise  lag  rahein  hain  sabhi  chehre mujhe,

Hosh ki ye intiha hai ya bahut nashe mein hoon

(All the faces look alike to me; is it some extreme consciousness or am In drunk tight?)

What was it with IR? We would soon see.

I started writing this story sometime in January 2019, within a month of my retirement. It all started when many magazines and journals requested me to write a story on making of Train 18 and I did not know where to begin. But willy-nilly, I wrote some articles which were promptly printed. Some magazines carried my interview also and that content was readily available without me needing to stretch too much in sitting down to write ab initio. So far so good. But I soon realized that it was not easy to put down the story in a mere article. It needed more detailing, more space. I, therefore, revived my moribund blog, An Indecisive Indian, and started to write more meaningfully, or at least so I hoped. I continued writing for about three months, which, blog by blog, meant some thirty chapters. But soon, palpable negativity and venal discourses took over as far the future, and yes the past, of the train was concerned and I lost the motivation. Well, about all that later. For the present, as the Corona scare saw to it that we all stayed locked down at our homes in March 2020, I realized that silence was no solution and regained the impulse, and then the impetus, to start writing again. 

As Railway Advisor (Minister) in the Embassy of India, Berlin, from October 2012 to October 2015, incidentally the only Joint Secretary level assignment for a railway man outside India, I was required to liaison with the foreign railways and railway industry all over the world. This also meant a lot of travel. Occasionally, my wife, and son then aged 12, would also accompany me, their other engagements and school schedule permitting. We were once on our way to Wroclaw, Poland from Berlin in a train. At a station in Poland, a plain box type unsightly train stood out, perhaps a remnant of Soviet era. My 12 year old son exclaimed, "Papa, dekho, India jaisi train" (Papa, look, a train like the Indian trains). Used to seeing swanky modern trains in Germany and other countries in Europe, his reaction was certainly not out of place. By brushing all the trains of Indian Railways in one stroke, he had unintentionally shown the mirror to his father as only a child can do.

“The voice of parents is the voice of gods, for to their children they are heaven's lieutenants”, a character says in "The Double Falsehood," which has sometimes been attributed to Shakespeare and it could well be apocryphal, but that is beside the point. What about the voice of your child? The bard certainly covers it with Lancelot proclaiming in The Merchant of Venice, “It is a wise father that knows his own child.”

I think I was wise for once. My son was voicing precisely what had bothered me for decades. Why do our trains look the same year after year? The same metallic box with unseemly windows and doors. The only thing which changed has been the colour from gulf red to blue. Introduction of air-conditioned coaches was indeed a minor mutation but that happened forty years ago and these AC coaches have absolutely the same recall. We changed the look somewhat when we brought a new technology from Germany but the novelty and its effect were very short-lived; we make these German-technology trains in much larger numbers but they have also taken the same grim appearance. A look at the passenger trains of Indian railways is like a millionth déja vu of more of the same.

When will we have a modern train?

You may find it surprising that a railwayman of forty plus years is talking about a childish query. You have to see it as an embryo which never seemed to develop towards birth. I too carried the same query in my childhood with a wistful desire to see foreign-looking trains in India. I had a boyish interest in trains just as so many children have it through ages. I hadn’t travelled abroad in my childhood but pictures of trains from the western world fascinated me and total lack of similar flair and charm, and a sense of speed, in our trains were pretty disconcerting. As I later joined Indian Railways and looked at the issue an engineer, I was none the wiser and it continued to remain a mystery. As I progressed up on the hierarchical ladder of Indian Railways, I realized that despite the ability to change things, the bureaucracy would not let even the most obvious plans actions take shape. As I graduated from simple maintenance and operations in the field to design and manufacture of rolling stock, things became clearer.

Let us not talk about a thousand things that we do not do although we should. We will look at this business of modern trains only, more precisely, in railway parlance, train sets. So what is a train set?  A conventional train is made up of coaches and a locomotive, an engine in common parlance, at one end or either end, which require to be attached and detached as per requirement, say at stations for reversal or at destination for maintenance. A train set is a train of permanently-coupled coaches such that all the equipment for powering or braking the train, for train-lighting and air-conditioning, i.e., all equipment is mounted under the train chassis itself and there are no locomotives.

A train set has many advantages over a conventional train. It affords higher speed, and faster acceleration and deceleration as power equipment is packed all over the train and not limited to a locomotive. It offers better maintainability because the entire train is maintained as one unit unlike a conventional train which is broken into locomotives and coaches that are maintained in separate depots. It requires no reversal at the destination or otherwise and saves precious time at terminals. It is more spacious for passenger comfort as the entire on-board space from one cab to another is totally available for passenger amenities. It is provided with wide gangways between coaches, unlike the rickety vestibule we have in our trains, and one can move from one cab to another over the entire length of the train with ease. A conventional train has additional coaches, called power cars, for supplying electricity for hotel load, the electricity for train-lighting and air-conditioning whereas a train set has all these equipment placed under the board. Since the number of rolling stock per train for the same number of passengers is significantly less due to elimination of locomotives and power cars, It is more energy-efficient. With the absence of locomotives and power cars, all the stock, or all the coaches of the train, have more or less of the same uniform look, lending it a very aesthetically-pleasing appearance, and making it more amenable to provide modern exteriors to satisfy the boyish aspirations of many.

A modern train set

Sealed gangway in a train set

A clear benefit of a train set is operating flexibility and cut down in travel time. The trend world over for the last 25/30 years has been to totally switch over to such trains and discard the conventional trains. All countries with advanced or large railways systems, e.g., Europe, particularly Western Europe, and Japan for some three decades and even China, South Korea and several middle-income countries in recent 15 years, have been deploying train sets for medium and high speed services, either with two power units at the end or with distributed power all over the train. It makes a great sense in India also to introduce such modern trains as ours is the heaviest passenger railway network in the world and it would not only make trains more punctual but you can run more trains; our large network calls for great stress on train punctuality and since it is saturated, undue strain on operation. In this background, any rolling stock which cut down travel time would clearly fulfil a pre-eminent need; train sets offer just the right solution. It would offer a great relief to a system bursting at its seams due to over-exploitation of train handling capacity.
In the background of these obvious advantages and the trend of near-total acceptance of this concept the world-over, necessity of a switch-over to train sets in India was not something which required a debate. So why is it that we do not have such trains at all? Why more of the same, the same type of dreary trains, year after year, decade after decade? Are we not capable, after decades since independence, to manufacture such trains?

The answer I am afraid is not very complimentary to IR. We have been debating about it for decades but not reaching anywhere due to departmental turf war and wranglings. There is one wing which maintains coaches and another which maintains locomotives. Now, a train set is neither a coach nor a locomotive so who would do it, who would own the train? This battle became the primary concern and let the need of the country go to hell. Then there was an import lobby which wanted to import these trains at great cost with attendant payment for technology transfer. Import is good for many as you know, but be that as it may, this attempt was in any case stalled by the lobby that did not want train sets. I dare say that I was equally guilty, like so many of my colleagues and seniors in the decision-making tree, not to have been entirely honest while analysing the issue. I was a part of this shameful warfare as a Director and later as an Executive Director at Research, Design & Standards Organization (RDSO), Lucknow, the premier central R&D wing of IR. Departmental loyalties, however, did not cloud my judgement fully. I had not only internalized the crying need for train sets in India but also made it clear to whoever listened that train sets would arrive in India, sooner or later, and that we should shed dilly-dallying and petty prevarication to work towards getting them through some amicable resolution of the internecine conflict. I pleaded many time with the powers that be that we should find a solution to this quibbling and come together to give the country a modern train but mine was perhaps a lone voice in this battlefield of mutually destructive interests. A lone wistful voice and whatever amateurish vision I had of building train sets for India remained just a dream.

Although the poet Muneer Niazi tells you that,

Khwab  hote  hain  dekhne  ke liye

un mein ja kar magar raha na karo

(Dreams are meant for viewing, do not go and live inside them)

I was indeed living in this dream.

In August 2016 I came in line, with two other colleagues, to be posted as a General Manager (GM) on IR. The post of a General Manager is not as ordinary as it sounds; on IR it is nothing short of an institution. All along your career in railways you look up to a GM as a panacea for all ills facing your work life. You aspire to reach this milestone in your career to be finally able to do something significant. On the other hand, if you were a kind with no itch to make a difference, simply to enjoy the fruits and benefits of office; in the pristine bureaucratic set up of IR, a GM is nothing short of a feudal lord. One caveat. A GM of a Production Unit (basically a large factory), unlike an open line zonal post is a lesser mortal, confined that he is to a much smaller domain. There was a possibility of my posting in either a factory or an open line zone with Integral Coach Factory, the biggest coach-builder of IR, being one of these factories. I clearly knew waht my calling was; I had my dream to take care of. I requested to be assigned to ICF, which surprised A.K.Mittal, the then Chairman Railway Board (CRB), as he was regularly flooded  by requests for a posting in an open line zone. I told him that such a posting may afford a quasi-feudal fiefdom but my mind lied elsewhere and that I was making his job of assignment easier by choosing a PU. I soon joined as the GM of ICF.

There I was, with many thoughts, emotions, misgivings and optimism but what resounded and redounded the most was this:

Ab falaq yun kare ki  sach ye khwab ho jaaye

Barson  ka  mera  shafaq  ab aaftab ho jaaye

(Let the sky make this dream come true and after years of twilight, let the sun shine)

(to be continued....)