IMPERIAL GRIT, SPIES AND LOCOMOTIVES
23 January 2020
In March 1887, Quetta, a compact little frontier town with a British garrison served by businesses owned almost entirely by Parsis and Hindus, saw the first-ever railway train pull into its spanking new station building. This was, however, not in the service of the people of the land. The line, much faster than the earlier camel trains, was to put British troops in quick access of the unruly frontier with Afghanistan, where an ever-expanding influence of Czarist Russia was threatening British interests.
Whatever the case, looking back today, one can but only marvel at the heroic effort of putting this line through. The remarkable thing about the main line up from Sindh into Balochistan is that it was, in the words of railway historian P.S.A. Berridge, “a tale of appalling muddle in the beginning, of extreme privations in the face of terrible heat and freezing cold, and of success achieved through sheer grit and determination to win a route through forbidding and inhospitable desert and mountainous country.”
Labels: Balochistan, Heritage
posted by Salman Rashid @ 17:51,
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