Echoes on the platform: How Indian Railways shaped my life and nation

I walk briskly on the railway platform, my walking-stick umbrella in hand. Not a soul in sight. About 200m of platform, open to the sky, with the fresh morning breeze on my face. There are two tracks, and across them, another platform—also invitingly empty. I walk up and down one side twice, then cross the tracks to walk the other. In the distance, another old man enters to perform the same morning task. We cross midway and say ‘good morning’.

This is Vellayil Station, barely 4km from the buzzing Kozhikode Junction in Kerala. Only four passenger trains stop here now, though the station was once a bustling halt for commuters wishing to connect directly to the city centre. The platform remains a sanctuary of silence for most of the day, just as I found it this morning. Although Mr Kamal, the halt agent, was not in the ticketing office or waiting room, I saw that he had watered the plants—a small sign of his presence.

As I continue my walk, the rhythm of my steps becomes the rhythm of memory, transporting me back to when trains were the soundtrack and arteries of my life. But they were more than that. Looking back now, I can see that the history of Indian Railways and the arc of my life have been running on parallel tracks all along—and it took the stillness of an empty platform to make that clear.

RAILS OF MEMORY

My fascination with trains began as a child in Bangalore. It was a graduation from wanting to be a tractor driver to the ultimate dream: being an engine driver. My play was a physical thing—chugging along with a ‘ko-ko co-chu, co-chu, co-chu, ko-ko’ and the forward-backward arm movements mimicking pistons. The ultimate treat was a visit to the station to watch the grandeur of a steam engine ease into the platform and count the number of compartments. The glimpse of the coal-faced driver and fireman, the fiery red of the furnace, the muscular heave of the pistons—it was a spectacle that constantly refined my ‘pretend train’ movements.

Then, at the age of eight, I got the greatest bonus: we moved residence to Millers Road, right behind the famous Bangalore Cantonment Station. The whistle of the steam engine became the eternal music of my days. In the morning, it was the Cochin Mail signalling the arrival of fish from Kerala. In the evening, my mother would be prepared to receive a guest looking for a place to spend the night.

But just imagine my luck. My father discovered that there was a passenger train which left Cantonment at 7:45am and would arrive at Bangalore East Station, right beside my school, at 8:00am. It was brilliant timing. So as a nine-year-old, I stopped taking the bus to school. For the bargain price of 75 paisa for a monthly yellow season ticket, I became a train commuter.

My guardian at the station was Muhammad, a tall, lanky porter. He made sure I boarded safely with my heavy school bag—a little blue suitcase. One day, I mustered the courage to ask if I could board the compartment just behind the engine. After a brief hesitation, he agreed. He carried my suitcase in one hand and held my hand with the other, walking me to the front of the platform. When the train stopped, he did the extraordinary: he showed me the inside of the engine up close and introduced me to the driver, Richard, instructing him to make sure I got off at East Station.

This ritual lasted three years, ending for two reasons. I was learning to ride a bicycle, the main means of private transport for the common person in Bangalore. And then came the final straw: the day I was attacked by a monkey on the footbridge. He must have been observing me, and thinking the packet in my hand was food, he decided to snatch it. It was not. It was just books that would not fit into my suitcase.

The end of my school commute was just the beginning of my life with trains. I have witnessed a sweep of technological change—a progression best told through the journeys themselves, and interestingly, through the evolving face of the engines.

My first memorable long-distance ritual was the annual trip to Kerala in the early 1960s. At 8pm, we would board a third-class unreserved coach attached to the Madras Mail. Muhammad would muscle his way in, spread a ‘hold-all’ on the luggage rack, and dump me on it with a firm instruction to stay put. My parents occupied seats below. Other passengers spread bedsheets or old copies of the Deccan Herald on the floor between the wooden plank seats. At Jolarpet, our coach was detached to wait for two hours before being connected to the Cochin Mail. Suddenly, you were moving in the opposite direction—a child’s momentary fear that you were heading back to Bangalore. But by 8am, you reached Ernakulam, then crossed the platform to a metre-gauge train that finally delivered you to Chengannur by 3pm.

The face of the engine on those early trips was the flat-faced steam locomotive—a noble, puffing beast with two round fixtures like eyes and a large glowing light at its centre, a thick plume of steam rising from its tall chimney.

By the mid-1960s, progress arrived in the form of the Brindavan Express, the pride of the Southern Railways. By 1966, it ran with two diesel engines, covering the 350km to Madras in just 5.5 hours. This was a different world: a vestibule rake with a pantry car renowned for its excellent food. From 1968, while studying in Madras, this was my luxury. The third-class fare was 27. I made an interesting discovery: a halt every hour, every 70 kilometres—Bengarapet, Jolarpet, Katpadi, Arkonam, and then Madras Central.

The diesel engine’s face was a tall, boxy thing, a single lamp set high like a watchful eye. It felt sturdy, purposeful, its occasional burst of smoke more lethal to the lungs than to the eyes.

The time I used trains most was at Madras Christian College in Tambaram from 1968–1971. The suburban electric trains were a relentless routine, shuttling us between the rural outpost of Tambaram and the metropolis at Egmore or Park Station. A ride to Egmore cost 70 paisa and took 40 minutes. Boarding at Tambaram guaranteed a seat; the return journey from Park meant standing tip-toed, holding an upper rail, and guarding your purse from pickpockets.

The electric engine’s face was broad and clean, with two square windows like eyes, each fitted with a slim wiper. It was sharp, alert, a workhorse.

By 1973, I had patronised my first ‘royal’ train: the Tata Nagar-Howrah Steel Express while at XLRI, Jamshedpur. It was a frequent four-hour weekend journey with classmates. The great thing was its swanky restaurant car—tables for four with proper mats and napkins, red curtains at the windows. Having bread and omelette with tomato sauce, with tea served in pots by waiters in white attire and pleated turbans, felt like the ultimate in feudal luxury.

Each engine had its face, and each face had its era. The steam engine’s was round and fire-lit, almost animal in its expressiveness. The diesel’s was boxy and utilitarian, built for function rather than feeling. The electric engine’s was clean and efficient, a city face. The machines changed; the tracks beneath them did not.

RAILS OF HISTORY

This lifetime of travel on tracks laid in a different era led me to reflect on their origin. In the colonial period, railways were not built to serve the people of India—they were built to serve the Empire. Their primary purpose was to move cotton, jute and coal from the interior to the ports and bring British manufactured goods into every corner of the subcontinent. The system broke the backbone of Indian handicraft, encouraged forced commercialisation of agriculture, and enabled rapid military movement. It was a steel grid for extraction and control.

And yet, history quietly inverted this purpose. After independence, the same tracks became threads stitching a nation together. They became the lifeline of industrialisation, moving coal, steel and grain across long distances. They connected remote regions, generated millions of jobs, and came to the rescue during floods and famines. But more powerfully, they connected people. They created a social commons where the many Indias saw each other, spoke to each other, and became one people in motion. The third-class unreserved coach—that great democratic chaos of bedsheets, tiffin boxes, crying children and strangers becoming neighbours overnight—was perhaps the most radical piece of nation-building infrastructure independent India inherited and made its own.

This inversion feels personal. I have seen the face of the locomotive evolve from steam to diesel to electric, and now to the Vande Bharat—a sleek, aerodynamic face that curves like a bird’s beak, a symbol of modern, high-speed grace. It made its maiden run in 2019 from Delhi to Varanasi. It only reached Kerala in 2023, a delay that speaks to a lingering bias against the south in the national imagination of progress.

And yet here is the irony worth pausing over: the Vande Bharat Express that runs the length of Kerala is now among the most profitable for the Railways. Colonial steel, originally laid to extract resources from the periphery and deliver them to the centre, has been turned—by sheer density of people, by the mobility and remittance economy of Kerala, by the stubborn vitality of a society the planners never had in mind—into a vehicle by which the periphery asserts its own energy. The south arrived late to the party, and promptly became the best-paying guest.

THE SAME STORY

Through my lifetime, this changing face of the engine has been the clock-face of time. Technology moved in leaps, but what changed slowly and deeply was my understanding of what the Railways really is. It is not only about movement across geography, but movement across worlds, relationships and eras of life.

The child who stood in awe before the furnace of a steam engine, and the old man who now walks an empty platform at Vellayil in the morning light—they are not two separate stories. They are the same story, viewed from different ends of the track.

The intimate personal line and the vast national line run parallel, converging somewhere just beyond sight. And when I walk that silent platform today, I can feel the vibrations of both beneath my feet.

John Kurien frequently travels by train, and resides in Kozhikode, Kerala.