Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

Life on the wheels of steel

In the era of the Metro rail network, R.V. SMITH recalls the days when steam engines used to wail in the middle of the night

There is a railway line just behind Brar square over which passes an electric train late in the evening. It's the time when people are returning from office and some of them pause to look at the train. Others don't, for it is a daily occurrence for most belated home goers. There's darkness over the track, with only the engine light to pierce it. Stay close to the track and wait for the train to pass by. A lot of bushes are in your way, but once you have braved a few scratches you are in a position to observe the almost empty compartments and the man who drives the train.

He is a gaunt chap who must have handled steam engines at one time. His arms are covered, so you don't know if they are adorned with all those fancy tattoos of fairies, snakes, hearts of love and a cross with a thorny creeper. His face is expressionless (does he ever smile?), and his eyes seem to penetrate the darkness, like the engine light. He looks a solitary man. Perhaps there was a jack assisting him in the good old days, shovelling coal into the engine, his muscles standing up to the task and black soot covering his face and the dirty rag on his head. Those times are past now. The driver doesn't need a jack to keep the engine running, and the merry fire burning to build up the steam. They were forever making tea on it in those days. Now they can't - it's electric traction.

An interesting mix

The driver buzzes by in his engine and you might see a man standing in a compartment thinking of when he'll be home. Perhaps his wife and children await him, perhaps not, for the wife may be busy cooking a frugal dinner and the children sleepy and hungry. The father taking a train ride is a fruit seller. You can make that out from the empty basket he carries. Does he sell bananas or oranges? Apples must be too costly for him and you cannot imagine him selling papayas. Could it be that nobody awaits him at home, for he might be one of the many who form Delhi's floating population and whose families are in the nearby towns?

A group of labourers is sitting in the next compartment, chatting away in the congenial atmosphere after a hard day. They don't look dog-tired though. Long practice has taught them to conserve their strength. In the next compartment sit a group of people who must be working in some office. They are playing cards, with not a care in the world, it seems. The files, the paperwork, the boss's retort are all forgotten. The second last compartment contains a jeans-clad youth, humming a song, and then, as the guard's cabin passes by, you are left alone in the darkness on a lifeless track bereft of the company of the local train. It happens every evening - this show on wheels of steel powered by the wires overhead in areas where the Metro has not yet penetrated. But few have the time to stand and stare.

For those who do, it brings back memories of times gone by and of an Anglo-Indian boy called Desmond. He was a jack of the Western Railways, which had one of the best hockey teams in the 1950s, with players like Saxbe. Desmond, fair, stout, handsome, with a big puff mounted on his side-parted hair, had a rich store of stories which he related whenever he came home to his adoptive family in Ludlow Castle Road. He was an orphan, brought up by the nuns and priests in Agra.

One rainy evening, as Desmond sat sipping his coffee, he got into the mood to relate some of his experiences. This one occurred on the stretch between Alwar and Phelera. "It was a winter night," he said, "When the driver of the train was going at a very fast speed to make up for the time lost because of delayed line clearance at Bandiqui and Dausa. Suddenly Sunny Vybert saw a girl in white walking in the middle of the track, and what was even more surprising was that she was leading a cow right in the direction of the steam engine. The time was ten past midnight."

Sunny was bewildered and pointing out the unnerving sight to his jack, applied the brakes with full force. But by that time, the engine had run over both the girl and the cow. As the night Express came to a screeching halt, Sunny and Desmond jumped down to see what remained of the two trespassers. They expected to see a grisly sight, but what they saw was perplexing. There was no sign of the girl or the cow, though they looked all around and the guard too joined them in the search."Weird surely," said Desmond Wilson, finishing the coffee in one gulp. "We later learnt that a village girl and a cow were run over by a train some years ago on that stretch, and ever since, that spectre sometimes disturbed drivers hurrying on their way to Phelera."

You don't associate such yarns with electric engines, which do not wail like the old steam ones. Do you?

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail