Alas, Sindh is now Lost: Indus Valley State Railway
29 March 2013
Apocrypha of exploration has it that somewhere along Burnes’ journey through Sindh, a fakir sitting by the river, upon seeing his approach, wailed, ‘Alas, Sindh is now lost. The English have seen the river, the road to our conquest.’ To Burnes himself a native soldier said, ‘The evil is done. You have seen our country.’ Twelve years later Sindh was taken by the army led by Charles Napier. Within months steamers, precursors of the railway, were plying up and down the Indus.
Read more »Labels: Book of Days 2012, Pakistan, Railway, Wheels of Empire
posted by Salman Rashid @ 09:15,
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Stealth in Steel: Kandahar State Railway
28 March 2013
The lonely spot where the IVSR swung southeast to reach Sukkur was headed for fame. Barely months after the first train chugged through the forested spot of Ruk, the Second Afghan War broke out and suddenly the primary imperative for the government of India was to make a fast connection between Karachi and Quetta, and beyond. The answer was the Kandahar State Railway (KSR).
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The order for selection of officers to work on this line went out on the autumnal equinox of 1879. Within ten days work commenced and in keeping with the urgency of the times, the first two hundred and thirteen kilometres of KSR from Ruk to Sibi was laid in a mere one hundred and one days! Completed on 14 January 1880, this feat has no parallel in the history of railway engineering in the subcontinent and remains a record to this day.
Labels: Balochistan, Book of Days 2012, Railway, Sindh, Wheels of Empire
posted by Salman Rashid @ 09:22,
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Arrow through Khwaja Amran: Chaman Extension Railway
27 March 2013
However, between the garrison and the vague border, there lay the great mass of barren rock called the Khwaja Amran. The clayey topsoil of the range turned to powdery dust when dry and deep mire when it rained. Through this variation did the trail snake around the contours of the mountain to drop down into the arid flat pan of Chaman on the Afghan frontier. Even in the best of times, a military column took three days to journey the one hundred and forty kilometres from Quetta over the Khwaja Amran Pass to Chaman. When it rained, it was nearly impossible to get laden mules and gun carriages through the knee deep muck. A revival of KSR was the answer.
Labels: Balochistan, Book of Days 2012, Railway, Sindh, Wheels of Empire
posted by Salman Rashid @ 10:46,
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As Lonely a Line can be: Nushki Extension Railway
26 March 2013
Even for the British, the far west of Balochistan with its rebellious tribes was an uncertain frontier. Consequently, immediately after the First World War broke out in 1914, a new paranoia rode the minds of authorities in India: infiltration through Iran by Turkish and German agents to foment trouble and precipitate the ultimate breaking away of Balochistan. A force was despatched from Quetta to the region of Saindak, now celebrated for its copper mines, to keep an eye on the situation.
The mode of travel of this force was a hundred sixty kilometres southwest to Nushki by what was then called the Nushki Extension Railway. Thence westward the remaining four hundred and sixty kilometres to Saindak by slow moving camel train. With the war in Europe dragging on and there being no sign of let up in the activities, supposed or real, of the Turko-German agents provocateur as well as the need to regularly rotate troops on that distant frontier, it was decided to extend the line.
Labels: Balochistan, Book of Days 2012, Railway, Wheels of Empire
posted by Salman Rashid @ 08:49,
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Doll House Station: Attock Khurd
25 March 2013
To the east the Kherimar (Sandal Destroyer) Hills of Attock district rise in a series of jagged crags; to the west flows the Indus in a channel thirty metres below ground level. On the far bank rise the sparsely forested slopes of the Suleman Hills in Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa and to the north and south the face of the earth is divided by the wide channel of the mighty Indus.
In this scenic setting, the doll house railway station of Attock Khurd stands on a low rise a hundred metres east of river’s edge. Its pitched roof with the chimneys and gables, the square pillars from which bell arches spring topped with keystones, and even the gargoyles were clearly designed by someone who valued English country architecture. This comely building, now festooned with bougainvillea, was left here as a lasting monument and a signature of the designer’s Englishness.
Labels: Book of Days 2012, Punjab, Railway, Wheels of Empire
posted by Salman Rashid @ 09:44,
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Worth its Salt: Sind Sagar Railway
23 March 2013
Deep in the Punjab hinterland, there runs a line that seems to lead nowhere. It takes off westward from the station of Malakwal, off the main line from Lala Musa. Had it been built after independence, one could look at it differently as a line meant to serve the travelling public.
But this was the Sind Sagar Railway that crossed the Jhelum River to skirt the purple loom of the Salt Range to Khushab, Mianwali, Kundian and down south to Darya Khan. Across the Indus from this sleepy town lay Dera Ismail Khan under the shadow of the Suleman Mountains and treading on the toes of Waziristan. As much a flashpoint in the 1880s as it is now, Waziristan needed monitoring and the Durand Line (drawn in 1893) patrolling. And so even the obscure old Sind Sagar was as strategic a line as PNSR or KSR.
But this was the Sind Sagar Railway that crossed the Jhelum River to skirt the purple loom of the Salt Range to Khushab, Mianwali, Kundian and down south to Darya Khan. Across the Indus from this sleepy town lay Dera Ismail Khan under the shadow of the Suleman Mountains and treading on the toes of Waziristan. As much a flashpoint in the 1880s as it is now, Waziristan needed monitoring and the Durand Line (drawn in 1893) patrolling. And so even the obscure old Sind Sagar was as strategic a line as PNSR or KSR.
Labels: Book of Days 2012, Railway, Wheels of Empire
posted by Salman Rashid @ 10:52,
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Stitch in the Crack: Chhappar Rift Line
22 March 2013
Out here, west of Khost, a huge Swiss Roll-shaped hill lay athwart of the axis of the railway line. This hill was no barrier for the line, however. Cracked open through and through by some prehistoric earthquake, the Chhappar Rift, as it is known, provided to the enterprising railway engineer the ideal crossing place from lowland Khost onto the Balochistan plateau.
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, Book of Days 2012, Railway, Wheels of Empire
posted by Salman Rashid @ 08:30,
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Blizzard Express: Zhob Valley Railway
20 March 2013
As it emerged on the north side of the huge gape of the Chhappar Rift, the line now called Sind Peshin State Railway turned westward to reach Khanai. Thence south it went to Bostan and Quetta. Late in the 19th century, a large quantity of chrome ore was discovered in the hills south of a little village called Hindubagh (renamed Muslimbagh in the 1960s). When First World War rolled around, the demand for chrome in the manufacture of steel armaments rose dramatically and Muslimbagh hit the map in a big way. Virtually within weeks a railway line sprang out of Khanai to snatch away the output from the mines.
Now, this seventy-four kilometre-long connection was not the ordinary Broad Gauge in use on the North Western Railway. This was, instead, the toy 2 foot 6 inch Narrow Gauge. During the war the line served its purpose well hauling out a huge amount of chrome ore. With the end of hostilities, railway authorities decided to extend the line all the way to Zhob, renamed Fort Sandeman three decades earlier. Thence, it was implied at that time, the line will drop down the Suleman Mountains to the dusty plain of Dera Ismail Khan in order to link up with the ferry of Darya Khan.
Labels: Balochistan, Book of Days 2012, Railway, Wheels of Empire
posted by Salman Rashid @ 09:11,
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Once upon a Line: Metre Gauge Steam
19 March 2013
If the lines west of the Indus River were built to serve a military strategic purpose, one stitch across the Thar Desert east of Hyderabad was laid purely for commercial reasons. This was the line from Mirpur Khas eastward to Jodhpur. It all began when the Karachi Chamber of Commerce represented to the government that a rail connection be established between Jodhpur and Karachi. The reason for this demand was that Rajasthan being connected to Mumbai by the Bombay Baroda and Central India Railway, all exports from Rajasthan ended up at Mumbai port. This was unfair and to the detriment of Karachi’s commercial interest, so her businessmen thought.In response to this demand, a Broad Gauge connection from Hyderabad to the village of Shadipalli, ten kilometres east of Mirpur Khas was completed in 1892. But the Jodhpur Bikaner Railway ran entirely on the Metre Gauge. Now, this entailed trans-shipment of freight at Shadipalli in the outback for onward transmission to Hyderabad.
Labels: Book of Days 2012, Railway, Wheels of Empire
posted by Salman Rashid @ 06:55,
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Going Nowhere: Jassar Bridge
18 March 2013
An 1856 report on the imperative of laying the railway in Punjab dealt at length with the importance of Amritsar as a commercial entrepot. It highlighted the trade that passed through this city to Europe and Central Asia. Here were wholesalers dealing in Tibetan wool, Kashmiri shawls, Afghan fruit, both dried and fresh, carpets from Turkey and furs and skins from Turkestan, besides European finished goods.
At that time, the great knot of mountains that we know as the Karakoram-Himalayan system was not fully explored. Map makers and explorers were however venturing into towns like Gilgit and Ladakh and spurred by the fast developing railway system in the subcontinent there grew a fantasy. It was as eccentric and far-fetched as any dream could be. This was the dream to take the railway from the plains, through the defiles of the Pir Panjal Range in Kashmir and across the Indus gorge to Gilgit. Thence, so the dreamers envisioned, it would strike northward into the grim and tortured chasm of the Hunza River to reach Chinese Turkestan.
Read more »Labels: Book of Days 2012, Railway, Wheels of Empire
posted by Salman Rashid @ 08:28,
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Some Said Scrap: Golra Railway Museum
16 March 2013
Only weeks earlier, DS Ishfaq Khattak and his Divisional Transportation Manager Hameed Razi decided to begin this collection of railway memorabilia. It was thought that with most of this old equipment either being phased out or becoming unserviceable, it was liable to be lost forever. The operation began on a tiny scale within the limits of the Rawalpindi railway division with instructions to all station masters to turn in old and unused equipment. And this proved to be a most prescient move.
Labels: Book of Days 2012, Museum, Railway, Wheels of Empire
posted by Salman Rashid @ 11:29,
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Wheels of Empire
13 March 2013
It all began in 1831 with Alexander Burnes who explored the Indus River and its tributaries all the way to Lahore. Twelve years later, in 1843, the army led by Charles Napier annexed Sindh under the rule of the East India Company and within months the first steamboat of the Indus Steam Flotilla, precursor of the railway, was plying the river between Karachi and Lahore.
But the Indus was and still is a fickle river. In winter it shrank to a channel no wider than a couple of hundred metres with a sandy flood plain of several kilometres on either side. In summer, because it has no hard banks in the plains, the river spread as much as thirty kilometres. Even though the route was known, navigation was difficult because of shoals and sandbanks and travel possible only during the day. Progress was therefore never faster than thirty kilometres per day.
Read more »Labels: Book of Days 2012, Railway, Wheels of Empire
posted by Salman Rashid @ 17:06,
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Bridge over River Soan: Rawalpindi Mianwali Line
07 March 2013
The line south from Attock city to Daudkhel and Mianwali was meant to be the direct connection between Rawalpindi and the ferry of Darya Khan connecting with Dera Ismail Khan. In that way, it was another strategic line. But it does not feature in any history of the North Western Railway.
The reason for its obscurity is not peculiar, however. When work on this line commenced in the mid-1890s, the situation in Afghanistan had about settled, if settled that country was ever going to be. Moreover, the connection to Darya Khan by way of Malakwal and Khushab had been commissioned in 1887 taking much of the importance of this direct line from Rawalpindi. In a way, this lonely little stretch of railway was stillborn, so far as its main strategic purpose went.
Labels: Book of Days 2012, Punjab, Railway, Wheels of Empire
posted by Salman Rashid @ 11:24,
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