SATPURA Train Narrow Gauge

SATPURA Train Narrow Gauge 

A SATPURA narrow gauge train that sets apart the experience as exotic—an unforgettable ride that leaves behind a pleasurable seasonality, a raw taste of what the Teal' India is like. Here you are .surrounded by colorful tribal folk—the Gonds and the Bhils. the Adivasis and other tribes that the anthropologist is at pains to discover and unearth, and for a short while albeit, a curtain is drawn aside revealing a rich tapestry of tribal life which the city dweller has never glimpsed before. The train rattles on humpily over the points, the carriages heave and sway, the clunk-thud seems to blend in with the unfolding landscape; but the old man wearing a turban and his wife seated opposite gaze out of the window, lost in a world of their own. 

Some ten years after the Bengal Naupur Railway Company was formed, engineering surveys were carried out in the then Central Provinces with a view to open a low-cost railway that would unite the region into a whole. The object of the railway was two-fold : first, to open up the agricultural and mineral resources of the region: and secondly, to safeguard the inhabitants of the area should a famine arise. The gauge selected for the purpose was 2 feet 6 inches and the first link from Gondia to Nagpur was opened in 1903. In the years that followed, construction progressed, till by 1913 Nagpur was connected with Chhindwara by narrow gauge. The 'Satpura Lines.' as they had come to be known, were the largest narrow gauge system in the country. With over a thousand kilometers of track mileage, the railway I inked together Jabalpur. Gondia. Nagpur and Chhindwara with extensions going as far as Naghhir and Chanda Fort in the south.

-After being around for more than a century, the Satpura railway is now on the brink of extinction with many of its lines already converted to broad gauge. But what remains still delightfully retains the flavor of a heritage railway. You can still end a points man walk up to the track and set the route whereupon a pretty little ground lamp will be found to flip its face towards you. And stations masters along the line still use Neale's token instruments making their entries in a voluminous train register maintained in the office.