Everyone else on the 6.55am Mandovi Express from Mumbai had somewhere to go. Some families were headed home to one of the towns along the 570km journey to Goa. Others were off to a holiday on the beaches, parents trying not to look as excited as their teenaged children.
Scenic ride: (top) The Mandovi Express. Karan Desaai / IRFCA; the train journeys across several viaducts. Apurva Bahadur /IRFCA
For every group of blasé commuters setting up card games, there was an equal number of long-distance travellers, lured by the promise of breathtaking vistas that the Konkan Railway opens up. Like the family from Kolkata, asking anxiously if the route was as scenic as they had heard—“that’s why we didn’t take a flight”.
I was the only one who was along just for the ride. I spent some of the 3 hours it takes to cover the 140km to Roha (Maharashtra), where the Konkan Railway officially begins, trying to solve the Mandovi Express’ existential crisis. Not an overnight train for easy travel, not a hop-into-next-towner, not a long-distance carrier, not even a day-trip aid that allows you half a day in the destination city. It’s slower than most buses, and still so popular that the last time I tried booking a fortnight before a trip, I was wait listed No. 393.
The demand for tickets on the 760km stretch from Roha to Mangalore in Karnataka is understandable. Imagine a train journey through thick forests, immense valleys, between, around and through hills, and over and along rivers. Every stunning vista is succeeded by one more stupendous, every bend in the tracks offers new surprises.
Initially, though, reality seemed to belie expectations. At Roha, only a decrepit warehouse signalled the start of this spectacular stretch. Another 40km later, past Veer—where the station is an evocative tree-lined avenue—there were still only hillocks to be seen. The big moment was yet to come.
I saw National Highway 17 snake off to twist and turn around a hill. Abruptly, everything turned dark. The train had plunged into a tunnel. A murmur coursed through the compartment—this was the first of the 91 tunnels on the route.
We emerged into sunlight and Karanjadi, its picturesqueness overwritten in memory as the location of a horrific train crash in 2004, when the Matsyagandha Express rammed into the debris from a landslide. But the profusion of green in the valley made that nightmare seem distant.
The changes came in minutes, even seconds. One moment, the train clattered through a narrow gorge, the rock faces on either side close enough to touch; the next, we were chugging through space, the ground beneath the tracks giving way to a slim, almost ethereal, viaduct, an overflowing river beneath snaking its way through uneven terrain, now covered with the blessed green brought on by the rains.