Iron maidens: 200 years after the first one, where will trains take us next?

Hindustan Times

14 hours ago

Apu and Durga hear a strange sound, of a kind they have never heard before.
They run run run through tall grass to find out what is making the noise.
They emerge from the grass to a sight that takes their breath away. Unfortunately, Durga stumbles and misses the spectacle. Her brother Apu stares, riveted: a steam engine, huffing and puffing, is pulling a passenger train.
This is widely considered the most memorable scene in Satyajit Ray's classic, Pather Panchali (1955).
Railways spelt magic. For young Apu and Durga. For most of us.
It has been 200 years since the spell was first cast.
The world's first steam-powered passenger train made its first run, from Stockton to Darlington in England, a distance of just under 42 km, in 1825. (The first passenger train journey in India, that famous one from Bombay to Thane, occurred 28 years later, in 1853).
Trains have, of course, changed everything since. They have democratised travel, sped it up and made it more comfortable; changed how goods are moved, drawn hinterlands closer to markets; allowed remote regions to participate to a far greater extent in economies.
They became, almost immediately, an integral part of economic progress. Food security, real-estate, defence: none of it was quite complete without the railroad.
It would take the world a while to get used to these new speeds (of 50 to 80 kmph, at a time when cars averaged about 40 kmph). In 1830, in fact, a Liverpool-Manchester train ran over British Member of Parliament William Huskisson.
He was attending the opening of a new rail link when he stepped from a train onto the tracks, with a few others. He was clipped by a rake on a parallel line, in what became the first widely reported death by passenger locomotive.
It's a fatal error people continue to make; perhaps the brain cannot adequately assess something moving so fast. Every year in Mumbai, India's densest rail commuter hub, an estimated 2,500 people die while crossing the tracks, most of them unable to judge the time it will take the oncoming train to reach them.
***
Back to the 1800s, the railways boosted the growth of cities and of empires. It became possible to live scores of kilometres away from work, and easier to rule continents where one had only the slimmest sliver of a claim.
As these new links connected harbour towns and interiors, making business more profitable for trading companies, colonial powers such as the British used them to solidify their reign.
In the US, the railroad networks shooting out across the continent spawned a new generation of millionaires. They also boosted an upwardly mobile middle-class that grew rich on investments in such companies, which saw stocks rise rapidly from 1865 all the way to the early stock-market bubble of 1873.
The collapse would be swift and devastating: a sad and since-recurring tale of a fast-expanding industry and adventurous investment firms taking a tumble together.
In early echoes of a pattern that continues to be repeated, banks and businesses that had leaned on each other, counting on the continued railroad boom to see them through, fell like dominoes, in what became known as the Panic of 1873, a downturn that spread all the way to Europe.
***
The trains themselves chugged ever-forward. What started out as one type of rake, a steam engine pulling a set of carriages, grew to encompass a myriad forms.
There would be a lot more belching of smoke and fumes before trains began to go electric. In fact, the world's first underground railroad system, set up in London in 1863, was powered by steam until 1890.
These chugging engines would move troops, supplies and letters from home, during the Great War. Great big steam locomotives would play the sinister role of mass deportations to concentration camps, about two decades later, in what would come to be called World War 2.
***
Across the colonies, by this point, a strange thing was happening. Disillusioned by their continued exclusion from their own growing economies, and tired of their second-class status — even as they harvested the fields for cotton and fought in the wars on behalf of their foreign rulers — large colonised populations began to get restive.
In vast and diverse regions such as India and Africa, the cheap, fast-moving passenger trains were one of the things that made it easier to reach out across vast distances, and differences, and unite. (English, as a common language, would assist in this cause too; as would the radio, as a means of communication and broadcast.)
Think about how often one sees the train in the 1982 film Gandhi. Think about how impossible the freedom rallies might have been without the ability to fly across the landscape and be in two distant places if not at once then at least in one day.
***
Then the wars were over, freedom had been won.
The sense of wonder, captured so evocatively by filmmakers, writers, poets and painters, faded a fair bit as new marvels took over: cars, planes, missions to the moon.
Sample these awe-filled lines by the Scottish poet Robert Louis Stevenson, in his poem, From A Railway Carriage (1885)…
Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches…
Here is a cart run away in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone for ever!
A very different view emerges, less than a century later, in the Jethro Tull rock classic Locomotive Breath (1971; lyrics by Ian Anderson). Here, the train serves as a metaphor for much of what it, and the industrial revolution, have enabled: explosions of human industry, activity and habitation:
In the shuffling madness
Of the locomotive breath
Runs the all-time loser
Headlong to his death
Oh, he feels the piston scraping
Steam breaking on his brow
Old Charlie stole the handle
And the train it won't stop
Oh no way to slow down…
No way to slow down
No way to slow down
No way to slow down
No way to slow down
***
Japan built the world's first high-speed train, the Shinkansen or New Trunk Line, nicknamed the bullet train for how fast it flew. Special tracks minimised friction; aerodynamic design raised speeds.
At launch, the Shinkansen had a maximum speed of 210 kmph, in 1964. Speeds have since inched up steadily, to 320 kmph, then 443 kmph and now a high of 603 km per hour for its maglev or magnetic levitation rakes.
China has used high-tech trains to reinforce its claims over autonomous regions on its fringes, such as Tibet, in a move that doubles as a symbol of its reach and power.
These trains reach new kinds of highs. The Qinghai-Tibet link is currently the world's highest railway line, stretching about 2,000 km across the Himalayan plateau, from Xining in central China to Lhasa in Tibet.
***
India is now entering a new rail era, with plush trains launched for the Everyman and plans for high-speed links.
The country's vast population still depends on this extensive network, with the Indian Railways clocking the highest number of rides taken in the world: about 8 billion, across its 7,325 stations. The Indian Railways is also the country's second-largest employer after the Armed Forces (about 1.2 million are employed by the former; 1.4 million by the latter).
Millions of train lovers, meanwhile, feel the same kind of thrill Durga and Apu did, when they hear the clacking or hoot that indicates a train will soon whizz by.
(Ambi Parameswaran is a best-selling author and an independent brand coach. His latest book is Marketing Mixology. He can be reached at [e-mail])