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Posts Tagged ‘India’
Indian State Railways North West Frontier tourist guide
Tuesday, February 26th, 2013New book on Financing India’s Imperial Railways
Sunday, August 14th, 2011A book to be published in September 2011 looks potentially very interesting: Financing India’s Imperial Railways, 1875–1914, by Stuart Sweeney.
The Indian railway network began as a liberal experiment to promote trade and commerce, the distribution of food and military mobility. Sweeney’s study focuses on Britain’s largest overseas investment project during the nineteenth century, offering a new perspective on the Anglo-Indian experience.
Chapter 3 is entitled “Military Railways in India, 1875–1914: Russophobia, Technology and the Indian Taxpayer”. The book’s index is available at publisher Pickering & Chatto’s website, and there are a number of mentions of Afghanistan, the Kandahar Railway and related matters.
By the looks of it, this will be a serious academic study. Unfortunately, and probably not unrelated to this, it will also be sixty quid…
(other forthcoming books from the publisher include “The Unpublished Letters of Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke”. Will the very existence of such a book trigger some kind of publishing grandfather paradox?)
Hajigak ore mine rail link plans
Tuesday, June 21st, 2011Afghanistan’s Minister for Mines, Wahidullah Shahrani, speaks to India’s Business Standard about tendering of the Hajigak iron ore mine project, which includes an integrated steel plant that will consume high-grade coking coal from nearby deposits; a road or rail evacuation route
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China, which was awarded the Aynak copper mines in Loghar province, Afghanistan’s first big sale of mining rights in the post-Taliban era, has undertaken to build a railway line from the northern provinces, to Bamiyan (where Hajigak is located), to Kabul, and then to Torkham on the Pakistan border at the Khyber Pass.Shahrani believes that a viable alternative that could form the Hajigak evacuation infrastructure would be a railway line running westwards to Iran, along the Zaranj-Delaram highway that India had built in the mid-2000s, to the Iranian port of Chabahar.
Source: New Afghanistan mining projects create opportunity for India, Ajai Shukla, Business Standard, 2011-06-07
Afghan fruit by rail
Sunday, December 20th, 2009An article on the rail transport of Afghan fruit to markets in India.
Fresh Fruits from Afghanistan to India!
I fondly remember as a youngster – in late 1940′s and as late as early 50′s – the repeated shouts of burly, awesome Pathan vendors in our ‘mohalla’ in Lucknow: “Fresh luscious grapes from Chaman; red juicy pomegranates from Kandahar; “Buy them now, eat them now, lest you repent!”
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But whatever the virtues of the vendors, their assertion about the quality of their products was never in doubt. So with this childhood experience when I read the following lines in P.S.A Berridge’s old classic, “Couplings to the Khyber: The Story of The North Western Railway” I became really nostalgic about the fruits which are certainly no more:
“Built primarily as a strategic line the Chaman Extension Railway served for many years hundreds of tons of luscious fruits — grapes, peaches, and nectarines in particular from Afghanistan found their way to the markets of far-away cities in India. Before 1947, in the summer months, there used to run every day a train with its ice-packaged refrigerator vans destined for places as far away as Calcutta and Madras.”
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Let me now construct this interesting rail transportation story which has a human angle too.Source: Arunachala Grace, Sacred Power Site of South India, 2009-10-18
Railways of the Raj
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009A website which might be in interest to readers of this site is Railways of the Raj
WELCOME TO THE RAILWAYS OF IMPERIAL INDIA
This website sets out to capture the flavour of the Railways of the Raj, that giant colossus set up and equipped by the British and founded on the power of steam. We take a look at impressions, reminiscences and memoirs, pictures, extracts from diaries, even that odd letter Aunt Jane wrote telling how she was stranded at Bombay Victoria Terminus station back in the twenties.
More
Industrial Locomotives of South Asia website launched
Sunday, September 14th, 2008
Simon Darvill has undertaken extensive research into industrial locomotives in south Asia, and the results have been compiled into a new website, www.ilsa.org.in which is now live.
There are detailed records of industrial locos which have been used in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Burma and Bhutan (yes, really!) since the early 1850s.
Included in the section on railways used for military purposes in India up to 1947 are details of railways used for British overseas campaigns up until the end of World War I. This includes the campaign in Mespotamia (now Iraq).
Simon has supplied this site with details of locomotives in Afghanistan; his site also has an Afghan section.
