Bibek Debroy: Not quite up to speed

The railway system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry.”  This is a quote by Karl Marx and most people are familiar with it. They may not necessarily remember where Marx wrote this and when. The piece was titled “The Future Results of British Rule in India”. He wrote it on July 22, 1853, though it was first published on August 8, 1853. The year 1853 is important because that’s the official date for the start of railways in India — April 16, 1853 to be precise — and Karl Marx must have known this. At 3.35 pm on April 16, 1853, with a 21-gun salute, a train with 14 railway carriages and 400 guests left Bori Bunder for Thane (then Tannah). With three steam locomotives (Sindh, Sultan and Sahib), that journey took one hour and 15 minutes in 1853.  Bori Bunder station is no longer used. A non-stop EMU (electric multiple unit) train from Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) to Thane still takes 57 minutes. This was the first commercial passenger service, not the first train. At that time, the fare from Mumbai to Thane was Rs 2 and 10 annas for first class, Rs 1 and 1 anna for second class and 5 annas and 3 pice for third class.

But this was for other passenger trains, not that first train ride. Since all 400 were invited VIPs, including Lady Falkland, the wife of the governor of Bombay, they probably paid nothing. An apocryphal story tells us the governor didn’t think the railway line was a terribly good idea. Therefore, Lord Falkland wasn’t part of the entourage. Quiz books should be amended a bit and Chintadripet mentioned, associated with Red Hill Railroad (RHR), built in 1836, two decades before Bori Bunder-Thane. It wasn’t quite an experimental line. There was probably an initial three-mile-long line from Red Hills to stone quarries around Little Mount, but this eventually merged with RHR’s permanent line. The line was built to carry granite for road-building work. It was a freight railway, but passengers also travelled on it. Though animals were supposed to pull the train, two or three steam locomotives (one of which was built by Madras Corps of Engineers) were also used. The rolling stock was possibly road-carts on railway wheels. RHR was closed in 1845 and this has to do with Arthur Cotton, Tasmania and East India Company’s sick leave rules.

Arthur Thomas Cotton (1803-1899) is identified more with irrigation and navigational canals, especially in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Cotton was the one who proposed that experimental line in Chintadripet. But he fell ill and East India Company’s leave rules mandated he couldn’t go to England every time he fell ill. This would have to alternate with recuperation in some other country. He went to Tasmania and introduced irrigation there. To the extent there was an irrigation/canals versus railways debate, Cotton was on the irrigation/canals side, evidenced by the 1854 monograph he wrote. However, had he not fallen ill and gone off to Tasmania, RHR might have been the first passenger train, not Great Indian Peninsula Railway and Bori Bunder-Thane. At that time, in 1836, Cotton also thought of a railway line connecting Madras with Bombay via a route of about 862 miles through Wallajahnagore, Arcot, Nellore, Bangalore, Bellary and Poona. The Bori Bunder-Thane speed in 1853 wasn’t remarkably slower than today’s CST-Thane speed. The speed of a passenger train depends on gauge and train category. For an ordinary broad gauge passenger train, we now have an average speed of 36 km/hour. For a mail/express train, it is around 51 km/hour (average speed is lower for goods trains). Note that a superfast train doesn’t mean it has an average speed of at least 55 km/hour. That used to be the case once.  But today, a train is “superfast” simply because it is classified as superfast.

I recently travelled on the Sapsan train between St Petersburg and Moscow. This is high-speed, not quite “bullet” class yet. It has a maximum speed of 250 km/hour and I couldn’t take my eyes off the electronic screen (with the speed) inside the coach. Though it didn’t touch 250, it flickered between 175 and 210. There are multiple reasons why we can’t have those speeds — high capacity utilisation on major routes, too many stops, mixed traffic on same track and rolling stock/locomotive/track/signalling problems. Note that the fourth is not a major constraint for 160 or 170 km/hour. In the short turn, the first three can’t be fixed. Take something like New Delhi-Bhopal Habibganj Shatabdi (12002). This covers New Delhi to Agra in two hours and two minutes (195 km) — an average speed of 102 km between Delhi and Mathura and 98 km between Mathura and Agra. Without those three constraints, it could have approached a steady 155 km/hour. With those constraints, we can only do Gatimaan Express (12050). However, that one hour and 40 minutes between Delhi and Agra is partly because the train starts from Hazrat Nizamuddin, not New Delhi. Shatabdi may take four minutes between New Delhi and Hazrat Nizamuddin, but less fortunate trains are known to take 30 minutes.

The writer is a member of the National Institution for Transforming India Aayog. The views are personal