The railway lines in Pakistan and the stories they tell
05 August 2019
A wintery morning. A small, all but abandoned, railway station. A few scrawny plants growing between its building and a double rail track glued on a cheerless slope with sombre, brooding hills closing in from all sides as if to prevent the station from escaping. That was Hirok station in the heart of Balochistan’s Bolan Pass — or at least that is my most abiding memory of it.
On a bench in front of the building lay what looked like a body shrouded in a grey shawl. To the grinding sound of our trolley’s brakes, it raised a bit of the shawl from its head to cast a bleary eye in our direction. Recognising the trolley men, it waved a languid hand and went back under the shawl. We passed on down the slope, once again gathering speed.
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, Herald, Pakistan Railways, Railway
posted by Salman Rashid @ 14:38,
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The railroad to Quetta
25 June 2019
As modern trains labour up the gradients of the Bolan Pass en route to Quetta, few travellers on-board would know that the first train to reach that city had not come up this way. In March 1887, the first ever train to reach Quetta had turned north at Sibi, passed through the Nari river gorge to reach the cool heights of Harnai, traversed that dramatic crack of Chappar Rift, veered west to Khanai and thence turned south to Bostan in order to make it to Quetta.
Chappar hill is shaped like a Swiss roll – a convex semicircular structure – at its western end. To the east, it turns into a fat mass of rock, deeply furrowed by rainwater that has washed down its contours for eons. Near the western end, the hill is cut asunder by a gaping chasm — a rift wrought by an earthquake that hit very long ago. At the bottom of the gash flows a stream which, depending on the weather, can either be a foaming torrent or a mere puddle.
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, Pakistan Railways
posted by Salman Rashid @ 13:28,
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Once Upon a Line
11 February 2018
Time was that I went around the country riding steam trains. From the narrow-gauge toy train connecting Bannu with Mari Indus to the metre-gauge trains of Sindh and the magnificent broad-gauge workhorses of what was once the North Western Railway, I rode quite a few. The last one I ever rode was the steam-hauled passenger train R-474 from Malakwal to Gharibwal. That was August 1994.
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| Gharibwal Railway Station |
On that trip I met Iqbal Ghauri, foreman at the steam shed at Malakwal. Speaking only sparingly, and then unhurriedly, he kept his voice low, but exuded the air of a man who knew his job and was proud of it. All his life he had worked on steam locomotives and even as Pakistan Railway was phasing out steam, he was hopeful of keeping his engines going. It was clear he was terribly in love with those dark beauties. His commitment and dedication was remarkable and one could not but like the man.
Read more »Labels: Heritage, Pakistan Railways, Railway
posted by Salman Rashid @ 13:09,
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The Forgotten Hamlet
09 October 2017
I knew Domeli from my few years in the army back in the 1970s when we did exercises (or as the Americans would say manoeuvres) in that area. I had no real memory of the town itself, located near Jhelum, but I recall seeing ravine deer in the hills not far outside the built up area. That past though is another country, for now we have successfully shot most of our wildlife.
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| Domeli Railway Station with 102 Down coming through; notice the raised platform on the left from where the signal, hidden behind a knoll, could be checked |
Recently my friend Haris Kayani hailing from Domeli phoned to tell me of the several spreading graveyards around his hometown. What could they possibly signify, he had asked. Large graveyards meant either a populous, prosperous town of the past or a staging post where caravans routinely tarried. The latter then pointed to a busy highroad through the area. Haris said I simply had to return to check out the burials of Domeli.
Read more »Labels: Heritage, Pakistan Railways, Punjab, Railway
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Train tourism
07 April 2017
Railways is among the more enduring legacies of the British Raj in the subcontinent. There is virtually an inexhaustible body of extremely interesting lore and history of the building of this great system of transportation discussed in a few excellent books and in the esoteric journals in the Punjab Archives. It is another story that the ignorant and asinine bureaucrats do not permit access to that great treasure trove.
Even if one has not read about the intricacies and heroism of the laying of the line from, say, Ruk (near Shikarpur) to Sibi, one can still stand on the platform of Ruk and wonder what the letters KSR and IVSR that adorn the façade in blue on white ceramic tiles mean. The lettering signifies that this little-known station was the junction of the Indus Valley State Railway coming up from Kotri and the new line to Quetta and Chaman called the Kandahar State Railway.
Read more »Labels: Pakistan, Pakistan Railways, Railway, Tourism
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Riding Steam
24 October 2016
On the eleventh day this past April, a train steamed out of Lahore Cantonment railway station after thirty-four years. No, I have not taken leave of my senses, as you may suppose when several trains go this way and that every day. A train literally, physically, steamed out of the station, as in being powered by steam, Not by diesel.
The West values its steam heritage. In Pakistan we have been unkind to it. On a trip to Britain in December 1997, friends took me to Loughborough to see steam locomotive No. 71000, known as the Duke of Gloucester, undergoing maintenance. It was told that only a few years earlier, this magnificent locomotive was spotted in a junkyard by a railway buff. Word got around, steam buffs came together, raised the money and purchased the machine before the cutter’s torch could destroy it.
Read more »The West values its steam heritage. In Pakistan we have been unkind to it. On a trip to Britain in December 1997, friends took me to Loughborough to see steam locomotive No. 71000, known as the Duke of Gloucester, undergoing maintenance. It was told that only a few years earlier, this magnificent locomotive was spotted in a junkyard by a railway buff. Word got around, steam buffs came together, raised the money and purchased the machine before the cutter’s torch could destroy it.
Labels: Pakistan Railways, Railway
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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What I told the Girls at LCWU
11 April 2016
Moneeza Hashmi is a very dear friend who values my work. It was in her tenure as General Manager PTV Lahore Centre that we did the 19-part, 30-minutes each, travel/history series titled Nagri Nagri Ghoom Musafir. It was also under her stewardship that I made the 13-part documentary Sindhia main Sikander on Alexander’s Indian Campaigns, once again each episode of 30 minutes.
The first series was executed in 1998-99 and the second in 2001. This was more than a quarter century after the now vaguely remembered masterpiece travel show titled Selani kay Saath had enthralled PTV viewers. That was the work of the one and only, the great doyen of documentary makers in Pakistan: Obaidullah Baig. OB, as we who had the great good fortune of being his friends, called him, was the master story-teller. The raconteur par excellence who leapt straight out of the pages of some thick medieval tome of fairy tales. When he spoke, his gravelly voice and the turn of phrase held so many of us rapt for he easily matched (if not outdid) Scherazade of the Thousand and One Nights.
Read more »Labels: Documentary, Geography, Guest Speaker, LCWU, Obaidullah Baig, Pakistan, Pakistan Railways, Sindhia mein Sikander
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The Line they Forgot
08 February 2016
The past truly is another country. Inspired by Paul Theroux’s classic in travel literature The Great Railway Bazaar, I endeavoured to execute a Little Railway Bazaar. And so I embarked upon a series of train journeys in Pakistan. I rode the narrow gauge train from Bannu to Mari Indus; the metre gauge from Nawabshah to Mirpur Khas and from the latter place to Khokhropar on the Indian border. I thrilled to the several crossings of the Nari River by those magnificent steel spans a century old at that time; and I beat the furnace wind of the desert plains of Dalbandin by a mere fortnight when I rode the Lonely Line to the Iranian frontier.
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| Where the Jalu jo Chaunro station once stood |
That was in 1986-87. That is more than a quarter century in the past. That was another country.
Read more »Labels: Pakistan Railways, Railway, Sindh, TNS
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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On a track less travelled
05 October 2015
On the twenty-fourth day of May 1883, the Sindhu River was bridged at Attock. The magnificent new steel structure stood within sight of the medieval fort built by Akbar the Great and over this bridge, the first through train from Lahore rolled on to Peshawar. Within the next two decades, new bridges spanned the mighty river again at Khushalgarh, Sukkur and Kotri and most of the railway network that Pakistan inherited at the time of independence was complete.
There is the ‘main line’ that most of us know of that runs from Peshawar to Karachi through Lahore. And there are other lines that only the most ardent railway enthusiast has ever heard of. There is one line that I had long known from hearsay for its very fine railway architecture deemed to be well worth travelling along. This is the railway connection between the towns of Attock up on the Potohar Plateau and Daudkhel in the foothills of the southwestern part of the Salt Range near the more famous Kalabagh.
Read more »Labels: Pakistan Railways, Railway
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Riding the ‘Kandahar State Railway’
06 July 2015
In late October the chill air of early morning in Quetta made me shiver. The railway station at just after seven in the morning was already bustling: a Sialkoti beggar woman in a heated altercation with a bearded Pathan threatening to get his legs smashed. Nearby an aged cripple shuffled along in a squatting position rolling a large round jute bag in front of him. From the windows of the train women and children peered while men waited outside scratching in their crotches and spitting all over the place. The tea kiosks were crowded but the book stall had just two men looking disinterestedly at some cheap pulp magazines – which, besides a couple of local papers, was all on offer. The Q-487 Passenger train to Chaman on the Afghan frontier was not yet ready to leave.
I was travelling in style in the Assistant Officers’ Saloon courtesy friends in high places in the Railways and Salim Jehangir, a jovial grey-haired Lahori and veteran of thirty years on the Railways, was keeping me company. This was just as well for he knew just about everything that was worth knowing about the railway in Balochistan. And what he did not know, his little note book listed in an immaculate hand. ‘This is a journey into history,’ he said with a twinkle in his eye as we rolled out of Quetta Railway Station one hour behind schedule. Earlier he had taken me on a tour of the train pointing out the sorry state of repair the carriages were in. It was used by smugglers, he said, to transport contraband from Chaman to Quetta, and the best place to hide the goods was in the water tanks feeding the toilets. The round plates held in place on the bottom of the tanks by bolts were nearly all missing. These, he said, were appropriated by the smugglers.
Labels: Balochistan, Pakistan Railways, Railway
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Railway engineering
05 September 2014
One of the most fantastic railway journeys in Pakistan once used to be north from Sibi, through the Nari River gorge, over the cool heights of Harnai, Nakus and Shareg to the wild west town of Khost. The Nari Gorge is the country of the proud Marri and Bugti peoples of Balochistan. Somewhere near Harnai, the line enters Pashtun lands all the way to Quetta.
And Khost! Oh, what another world it still belongs to. My last outing there was in February 2011, and nothing seemed to have changed since my first visit in 1986. Except, the train no longer ran. Early in 2007, some misguided Baloch had blown up three bridges in the Nari Gorge putting an end to the train service up to Khost. This was mischievous because who, but the Baloch themselves, would have gained from bringing tourists to visit this, the greatest railway engineering feat in Pakistan.
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, Pakistan Railways, Railway
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The Lonely Line
25 August 2014
When they laid it back in 1916, British railway engineers called it ‘The Lonely Line.’ The reason was the immense distances between stations. Whereas elsewhere in India stations were sometimes as close as ten kilometres, here one could travel ten times as much before making a railway station. In between there stretched a desert of rock, wind-sculpted sand dunes and sere grass. However, the official title for this line was Nushki Extension Railway or NWR.
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| The abandoned station of Alam Reg. Forlorn and forgotten |
From Quetta via Spezand, the line winds through the low, bleak hills of Nushki to descend into the desert beyond. Then there is one great wilderness interspersed with a few dusty little towns all the way to the border village of Koh e Taftan. Beyond, the line runs another hundred and fourteen kilometres across Iranian territory to its terminus at Zahedan.
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, Pakistan Railways, Railway
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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At Khost railway station
08 August 2014
Khost railway station sits in a remote region of Balochistan, northwest of Sibi. Once, when the twice-a-day train ran to it from Sibi, Khost was easily reachable. But since the destruction of the bridges over the Nari River in 2007, trains no longer run and Khost seems far away.
It used to be — and still is (my last visit being March 2011) — a place that belongs in films where Indiana Jones-type heroes search for ancient treasures. It is a place that smells of high adventure; there is a palpable air of some anxiety-making reality about it that Khost does not wish to divulge readily. The difficult access, the distant line of snow-streaked mountains (if the season is right), the sky of vitreous blue, the dusty hills and the turbaned Pashtuns strolling in the bazaar are all other-worldly.
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, Pakistan Railways, Railway
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Pakistan Railways - No Gravy Train
09 February 2014
Yes, showered. Those were still the glory days of the Pakistan Railways (PR) and the toilets in all air-conditioned sleeping cars had showers. Then the liveried bearer would stick his head in with his pile of trays with steaming goodies for breakfast. Indeed, breakfast was not all this man served; he would appear, as if by magic, at all mealtimes. The food was no match for the chicken curry, brown rice and egg ‘puteen’ served by railway rest house cooks, but it was passable.
Read more »Labels: Pakistan Railways, Railway
posted by Salman Rashid @ 10:16,
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Romance of the Railway
11 December 2013
The greatest adventure ever devised by mankind is, without any doubt, the railway. Aircraft might get us from one place to another in much less time but that’s no way to travel. With the landscape spread out like a map below the traveller never gets to know the lands being traversed. The landscape, the people, the colours of life, all remains unknowable and unseen from that high vantage. But trains are another story.
Trains have come a long way from the time they chugged along at a sedate fifty kilometres or so to where some of the newest lines in Europe and America can shoot you along at a dizzying two hundred and fifty kilometres an hour (even faster in Japan), but if you ask me, I would prefer the former. And the journey of my dreams is a slow train around the world. In a way, Pakistan Railways remain rooted in the past when it comes to speed and so, until about eight years ago, I did most of my long distance travelling within the country by rail. But then with endless delays and trains running up to five or six hours behind schedule between, say, Karachi and Lahore, I gave up. Gross mismanagement and what seems to have been an evilly advertent plot to destroy a fine establishment, put paid to a great system that the country had inherited from the British.
Labels: Pakistan Railways, Railway
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Last Train to Thal
01 November 2013
The last train from Kohat to Thal ran sometime in June 1991, so the Station Master at Kohat informed me. Then the section was closed. For a while afterwards, the staff remained at their stations; slowly they were re-assigned. The first to go were the Station Masters from the several stations strung out between the two termini. Gradually went the others, until only a very small nucleus of gang men remained – ostensibly to look after the abandoned one hundred-kilometre Narrow Gauge line. And ostensible was all the looking after there ever was.
Even before 1991 the Kohat-Thal line had shown every sign of impending demise. Back in early 1987 when I was doing my series called The Little Railway Bazaar pompously named after one of the good travel books of the 20th century, I had arrived in Kohat to ride the once-a-week train. The coolies around the station said that the Thal line being closed I would be better advised to ride the bus which was not only a sight more comfortable but faster too. My Pakistan Railways timetable said the service was still in operation, so not trusting the red-shirted coolies I sought the Station Master.
Read more »Labels: Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, Pakistan Railways, Railway, Sea Monsters and the Sun God
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Railway Station Ruk Relegated to Oblivion
13 September 2013
Except for those who serve on the Sukker Division of Pakistan Railways, there will be few to whom the name Ruk would mean anything at all. And when friend Raheal Siddiqui asked me recently if I knew why this railway station had once been important, all I could remember was that it had featured prominently in the laying of the Kandahar State Railway (KSR) – the line that was to connect Quetta with the rest of the country. And that is a great story, for it is connected with the Great Game - the 19th century struggle between the imperial powers of England and Russian for control over Central Asia. So, allow me to quote myself from an article published in this same newspaper almost five years ago.
‘When railways came of age around the middle of the [19th] century both nations saw in it the means to easily and quickly cross the great desert expanses of Asia. And so it was that while the Russians struggled to span the blistering Kyzylkum Desert, east of the Caspian, England was inching its way forward across the desert and mountains lying between Sibi and the garrison town of Quetta. Fear of the Cossacks riding in through the vast openness of Balochistan, the subcontinent’s back door, rode high and the “Kandahar State Railway,” as it was called, was top priority.
Read more »Labels: Pakistan Railways, Prisoner on a Bus: Travels Through Pakistan, Railway, Sindh
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Malakwal to Gharibwal
15 August 2013
At five minutes after eight every morning the R-474 steams out of Malakwal railway station for Gharibwal nestling under the most easterly escarpments of the Salt Range across the Jhelum river. It is a journey of twenty-two kilometres but the train takes an epic one hour and ten minutes – and that that when it is not delayed en route.
Though there is no First Class on the R-474, Geoff, Andrea, Shabnam and I are getting an even better deal: we are riding with the Assistant Transportation Officer, Zubair Ghouri, in his official saloon car. The fat and jovial Ghouri seems one of those few who are in the right line of work. With a penchant for travelling coupled with an insatiable curiosity he is doing well gallivanting around the country and being paid for it. He seems to have been everywhere that is worth going to and has an inexhaustible repertoire of traveller’s tales.
The saloon is a veritable home on wheels with an attendant’s room, a kitchen and a toilet.
Read more »Labels: Pakistan Railways, Prisoner on a Bus: Travels Through Pakistan, Punjab, Railway
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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End of an Era
03 August 2013
When, in the 1880s, the British laid the great railway network in Punjab, one busy junction was to be at Wazirabad. From here travellers coming up from the east or the deep south could change either for Peshawar on the frontier, or for Jammu nestling below the Western Himalayas. Those were the days of steam, and it fell to the lot of the small town of Malakwal (in present day Mandi Bahaudin district) to be the repair and maintenance depot in this region.
Those were the days when those black behemoths went steaming and clanking the length and breadth of the subcontinent. By the 1960, however, they were settling into graceful old age as they gave way to the faster, sleeker diesel locomotives. Towards the end of the 1980s Pakistan Railways were still operating with steam on a number of sections, with the Lala Musa-Shorkot haul (314 km) being the longest regular steam worked passenger service in the country at that time. The Malakwal facility was servicing over three dozen steam locomotives at the time.
Labels: Pakistan Railways, Punjab, Railway
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Trolley Travel
06 June 2013
The early years of the 19th century saw the beginning of one of the greatest struggles of modern times: the tussle between the two imperial powers, Russia and England, for ascendancy in Central Asia. This epic struggle led many a good man either to death or to glory, and one such was the young Scotsman Arthur Conolly who was beheaded in the central square of Bokhara by Amir Nasrullah in 1842. It was this high-spirited young man who, in a letter to his sister, gave the euphemism of ‘The Great Game’ to this conflict.
When railways came of age around the middle of the 19th century both nations saw in it the means to easily and quickly cross the great desert expanses of Asia. And so it was that while the Russians struggled to span the blistering Kyzylkum (Red Sand) Desert, east of the Caspian, England was inching its way forward across the desert and mountains lying between Sibi and the garrison town of Quetta. Fear of the Cossacks riding in through the vast openness of Balochistan, the subcontinent’s back door, rode high and the ‘Kandahar State Railway’ (KSR), as it was called, was top priority.
Read more »
Labels: Balochistan, Pakistan Railways, Railway
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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