What happened to the romance of train travel?

Being more environment-friendly, train travel offers a unique gift in the form of the glimpses into unseen landscapes and unknown lives. The way people hang their laundry, the decorations they put up in their backyards, someone stealing a smoke on their balcony, or taking their dog out on a walk—trains show us intimate details about strangers. “Travelling by night trains (for this book for almost 3 years) revealed to me the invisible army of workers who labour while the world sleeps to make our day agreeable," Rajesh says.

In an era of cheap airlines, it is hard to make a case for train travel, especially to Indians with disposable income. On a peak day in 2024, more than 500,000 Indians flew via a network of more than 3,000 domestic flights as a news report says. And yet, ironically, on 16 April 1853, when the first passenger train pulled out of Bori Bunder in Bombay (now Mumbai) for Thane, it was flagged off with the same promise as a flight now does: better connectivity and faster travel.

To this day, trains remain a popular mode of commuting, a convenient alternative to other forms of transport, all over the world, especially in India. A 2023 news report points out that Indian Railways serves 24 million passengers every day with its network of more than 13,000 passenger trains, running the length and the breadth of the country. Among long-distance trains, the Vivek Express, which runs from Dibrugarh in Assam to Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu covers more than 4,000 kms in over 75 hours. It is among the longest train journeys in India. But the wonder of long-distance train travel, with its attendant privileges of luxuriating in time and new company, is no longer what it once used to be for aspiring and upwardly mobile Indians.

TIME TRAVEL

One of the most iconic memorials to the railways as a modern marvel is in a scene from Satyajit Ray’s movie, Pather Panchali (1955), where siblings Apu and Durga dash through a field full of kaash flowers to catch their first glimpse of a locomotive. They hear its murmurations first, long before they can see it. The steam engine’s choo-choo gets closer and closer, then suddenly, the huge metallic beast is upon them, bogies rushing by one after the other, as the children’s hearts quicken with excitement, thinking of the great unknown into which the train vanishes.

Generations will be able to relate to this moment of nostalgia and wanderlust. My first train ride as a toddler—from Howrah to Bhubaneswar, en route Puri—was as wondrous as my first encounter with the sea. This allure of train travel was the stuff of childhood reveries. From miniature bogies made of wood and pulled by a string, to those built with sturdier stuff like Lego or plastic blocks, the train as a coveted plaything was ubiquitous for children all over the world. For a select group of adults, trains remain a serious lifelong passion—an expensive one at that—involving collecting vintage miniature models.

Trains were, still are, places where people make friends, fall in love, squabble over seats and share their food with strangers. Sometimes they get abducted (in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 film The Lady Vanishes, for instance) or, worse still, killed (most famously in Agatha Christie’s 1934 novel, Murder On the Orient Express) , though mercifully mostly in the universe of popular culture.

In the 1980s, when I took the Danapur Express with my parents to spend summer holidays at my maternal home in Patna, we joked, somewhat nervously, about the route being notorious for train robberies. A couple of decades later, travelling by myself in my 20s, I got enquiries about my marital status and income from inquisitive elders. The solicitous waiters on the Howrah-Delhi Rajdhani Express would coax me to eat breakfast, when all I wanted was to sleep in. For an introvert, the upper berth provided the best vantage, and refuge, on sleeper trains.

You could be present in this microcosm and stay unseen. You could lose yourself in a book or eavesdrop. “Travelling by sleeper trains feels like a holiday within a holiday," as Rajesh puts it. “You have a good 11-12 hours to do what you want. If there’s a pantry car you can sit there or chat with your co-passengers." Instead of thinking of ways to kill time, you succumb to its embrace, as it expands, slows down, and draws you into its own world. “You become part of a train family," Rajesh says.

Being thrown together into a confined space with strangers, sleeping in close proximity to them, even sharing a bathroom with them, for hours may forge unlikely bonds. I know at least one true story where a couple met on a train, left their respective spouses, and got married to start a new life together.

“It’s interesting how people start talking in a train," Rajesh says, “how it turns into a confessional space, not just for strangers, but also for close family." Recently, when Rajesh took her mother on a three-day train journey through Scotland, she was struck by the conversations they had inside the twin compartment. With nothing else to fill in the space and time ahead of them, mother and daughter spoke about experiences they had never had a chance before. It was the same with her father, on a trip they took together on the Orient Express from Paris to Portofino, where, unusually for him, he spoke about his life in India, and his family members, before he moved to the UK. “It was the train compartment that did it," Rajesh says.

REELS ON RAILS

I’m no longer sure if the train remains as much of a social melting pot of chatter and exchange, when our closest companions are handheld devices and watching reels without earphones is our favourite pastime. My last few train journeys—mostly short ones by chair cars—were memorable for the loud phone conversations that sometimes went for the entire duration of travel or wailing children being placated by electronic devices. Noise cancelling headphones are now a new normal, which not only drown out the ambient chaos but, sadly, also the clickety-clack of the wheels.

Rajesh, too, admits that the quality of connections on trains have changed in the last 15 years she has been writing about her journeys. “I avoid using my phone on trains, except as a recording device or to take an occasional photograph. Ironically, now, even those who are taking trains because they want to experience ‘slow travel’ seem to be completely sucked in by their phones," she says.

In 2010, when she wrote her first book, Rajesh had a Nokia phone that didn’t do any fancy stuff. It enabled her to have fleeting, but meaningful, interactions with fellow passengers. Later, as she worked on her book, she got back in touch with some of her sources to check facts and seek their permission to be written about. “In a sense, they became my ‘sensitivity readers’," she says. It’s all quite different now.

“Recently, as I was travelling from Jodhpur to Jaisalmer, the first thing that a group of young girls asked me after they boarded was if I was on Instagram," says Rajesh. As it inches towards its bicentennial anniversary, the passenger train in India is reinventing itself with vistadome coaches and bullet trains. Some of our premium trains are becoming cleaner and faster, though a vast majority remain filthy and sluggish. Either way, the serendipity of train travel, the chatter and warmth that once characterised it, are no longer what they used to be.