Foreword by Sir Mark Tully

( excerpts) 

 The engineers who built the Indian railways  constructed lines that climbed mountains, crossed deserts, ran the length of the Gangetic plain, linked the great centers of commerce, and provided relief for remote villagers threatened with famine. As the renowned travel writer and railway traveler Paul Theroux has rightly said, “the railway builders sewed together the entire subcontinent with a stitching of track.”  

Although the imperious Governor General of India, Lord Dalhousie, had decreed that there should only be one gauge so that India would avoid the problems Britain created by building two different gauges, eventually the Indian subcontinent was sewn together with stitches of four different sizes. This book tells the story of the network which pioneered the two smallest gauges of railways in India, known as the narrow gauges. The Dabhoi system consisted of branch lines constructed  on a gauge only two foot six wide because the traffic was never going to warrant the expense of the broad gauge, but it was firmly stitched to the mainline.

The railways of India still stitch this vast nation together. Ask a Mumbai taxi driver how he gets back to his village in Uttar Pradesh for his annual visit and he will probably say  “Pushpak Express”. The suburban railways stitch the city of Mumbai itself together. Commuters, pour down the steps of Mumbai’s Churchgate station in a veritable stream of humanity every morning.  Travelling many thousands of miles by train I have met politicians and pilgrims, holiday makers and those intent on doing business, students and their teachers, army officers and other ranks. 

The Dabhoi railways main purpose was to replace the bullock carts which carried opium grown in the Gaikwad’s state, Baroda,  on the first stage of its journey to the ports from where the drug  was shipped to China. In the nineteenth century opium stemmed the flow of silver from the imperial coffers. It balanced the books which had been severely in the red because of Britain’s demand for Chinese tea, textiles, spices, and other commodities. When the opium trade ended the Dabhoi railways busied themselves carrying cotton, again serving imperial interests by keeping the mills of Manchester spinning and weaving. 

The history of the Dabhoi Railways illustrates how the interests of Britain were served not just by the commodities the trains carried but also by the way they were constructed, and equipped.
 . A great deal  has been written about the mountain narrow gauge lines but historians have not had much to say about the lines that ran in the plains., so this history of the pioneering Dabhoi lines is particularly valuable, and makes fascinating reading.