The Indian Railways has a history of nearly 170 years. It is historically acknowledged as a great carrier of India’s engagement with modernity and progress. But is train journey in Indian Railways becoming a torture? Here, writer and academic Seshadri Kumar recounts one of his recent, harrowing experiences in the “New Age Technology driven“ Indian Railways. We call up on readers to respond to this, with your own experiences – Good, Bad, Indifferent – with Indian Railways … Read on – Editor, The Aidem.

My wife just returned from a rail trip to Chennai. And what she told me as I picked her up from the train station stunned me: “That’s the last time I’m taking a train in India.”

To know why I was stunned, you need to understand some background. My wife had always been a rail romantic before this. Her father was an Indian Railways officer who retired as the Chief Signals and Telecommunications Engineer in the Southwestern Railway in Bangalore. The family had lived all over the country, as is normal for an Indian Railways employee with a transferable government job. And most everywhere they had travelled anywhere in India in her life, they had travelled by train. She had always loved it. She had, therefore, always been a hardcore train devotee.

My own childhood was full of wonderful train trips. Most of them were the annual trips from Mumbai to my mom’s “native place” in Chengalpattu, near Chennai, where my mom’s mother lived. But I also remember a 48-hour trip from Mumbai to Dehradun on the “Dehradun Express” in 1988, when I went on the IIT Bombay-sponsored “Himankan” trip, in which we trekked in the Tehri Garhwal Himalayas for 10 days, starting from Sankree, near Dehradun. The “express train” was only 8 hours late, but that didn’t take away the fun of travelling in that train with a bunch of IIT classmates. I remember one leg of the journey starting in Haridwar, in which we had a steam engine pulling the train, and a few of us were sitting on the steps of the coach, inhaling the smoke from the steam engine as well as from the bidis (country cigarettes) we were smoking. On my return from Dehradun on that trek, I visited Delhi, and then returned from Delhi to Mumbai, again by train, this time by Paschim Express. It was highly enjoyable.

More recently, I remember going to Ahmedabad in 2003 to visit an old friend, and took the overnight train from Mumbai to Ahmedabad and back. All good experiences.

Since my return to India in 2006 after 16 years in the US and UK, I had a very busy corporate life for a long time until I recently retired from active employment. This meant that my vacations were limited and I didn’t have the luxury of being able to indulge in train travel very much for all these years. Most of our trips were therefore compulsorily by plane.

My wife had always been resentful about this. In 2014, we got an opportunity to travel by train when we decided to go to Goa from Mumbai by train. We were very excited about our big train trip, especially as the train was advertised as a “special holiday train.”

The experience was anything but special. The coach was dirty, the A/C wasn’t working well, and the wash basin was backed up and overflowing, so you couldn’t use it. Also, for some reason, we had to wait two hours at CST in Mumbai for the train to start. Now, some parts of the Mumbai-Goa line are one-way, so they schedule trains carefully so that trains can go seamlessly through those sections without waiting. But since our train was two hours late starting, it missed all the right windows. Our train had to wait at every chokepoint for trains in the other direction to pass. We finally reached Goa a full four hours behind schedule. The return journey wasn’t much better.

My wife assured me that this was an exception, and I should not colour my views on train travel in India based on this experience. I deferred to her experience and didn’t pronounce judgement. We both decided that that particular train was an aberration, and we had made big plans that, maybe next year (we would have like to do it earlier but for the pandemic), we would plan to travel a lot around India, crisscrossing India by rail. I could not join her on this trip of hers to Chennai, her first since the 2014 Goa trip.

Last night, after I picked her and our daughter up from Bangalore’s KSR railway station, she said she has now completely given up on the dream of train travel in India after this experience. She said that trains in India have gone completely to pot. This was the Chennai-Bangalore Shatabdi Express, and she said neither the toilet nor the wash basin was properly working in second class A/C chair car. One of the two toilets in the coach wasn’t working, and in addition, the toilets had become too small. And they stank. In short, it was an utterly miserable experience. She asked, how do they expect someone with a small child to travel in this? She told me firmly that she would only travel by car or plane from now on. This was shocking to hear from a lifelong lover of Indian trains, one who had often castigated me for not taking trains more often, even accusing me of being “elitist” for flying.

I should add a note about my woes at KSR station. My wife and daughter were waiting for me on the platform, but I had a miserable time trying to get a platform ticket. There’s no proper signage at the station on how to get a platform ticket, and when I finally went to a counter, the guy there shooed me off and pointed me to go in one direction. I went in the indicated direction and found a bunch of automated machines, but they would only accept UPI-based apps. I didn’t have a UPI based app such as Google Pay or BHIM or Phone Pe. I don’t like exposing my complete bank account to apps (what if someone hacks your phone?), and prefer options like PayTM wallet to options like Google Pay and PayTM UPI. The machines at KSR station do not accept cash. I kept hunting for some counter where I could buy a ticket for cash, but there wasn’t an option. The whole station was incredibly customer-unfriendly. Finally, I asked someone who was paying for a train ticket by Google Pay to buy a platform ticket for me and gave him the Rs. 10. This delay cost me 20 minutes.

I am curious to know if others have similar experiences. Should we really abandon our dream of experiencing India by train? We have a small child, so we cannot rough it out like we did when we were young. A train needs basic amenities. When I travelled by train as a young person, I never remember a situation when the toilets or the washbasin were broken. We have now seen this twice in the space of eight years.

So I ask: Are the Indian Railways really going down the drain?