General Information
India, such a vast country, yet such an easy country to navigate, by train of course…………
Indian Railways is a massive system but you can find everything you need to know relating to train times, costs etc etc on the following Websites:
To book your train tickets prior to your visit you can only do this via one place in the UK, this is SD Enterprises Ltd. Based in Wembley in North London, Shankar Dandapani (the SD of SDEL) offers an excellent service and will cater for your whole trip and not just your train tickets if you so desire.
For the Rail Enthusiast
For information on Indian Railways the best forum to seek advice, find information or post your own information is the IRFCA Forum which you will have to become a member of to be able to post on.
For those wanting to understand their Indian Railway geography The Great Indian Railway Atlas now on its second edition, is available from Samit Roychoudhury via his website.
India is becoming increasingly difficult to plan a trip around if you want to avoid GM’s, and not even the “sacred” trains that are usually pairs of Alco’s, are sacred anymore, as I rather unpleasantly found out! With there being only very limited bits of new track on offer these days, this trip was mainly Read the Rest…
Having only been back in the UK since 7th December, I’d already had this trip fully planned and all tickets were booked before I’d set off on the previous trip in early November. With only having a two week stint I made it simple and the long-distance pair moves allowed for three days based at Read the Rest…
After 14 years of travelling around India by train, not only had it come to the point where things were changing faster than we could keep up with current events, but Indian Railways had taken away our comfort zone and the time had finally come where I had to do a trip without the benefit Read the Rest…
Even though the wounds inflicted on the previous trip were still quite fresh, I altered this plan the day I got home from the last one; to attempt to deal with Khajuraho once and for all, at the third attempt. There had been quite a bit involving the MG in my plans but this all Read the Rest…
Having managed to secure one of the last ever Indrail Passes sold, and quite possibly the last ever, I had no choice but to make do with a 60-day Sleeper Class one; and decided to make use of it with a last-minute trip ahead of my long-planned 3-week trip in March. Two things swung it Read the Rest…
This trip would end up being a trip with a difference, and it would take away some of the luxuries we’d been used to while travelling around India’s rail network for the previous 13 years! SD Enterprises Ltd, the agent in London we’d used from day one for Indrail Passes, had only been able to Read the Rest…
With so many things left unfinished around the country it became frustrating attempting to try and do what I wanted on this trip; mainly because a lot of what I needed to do hadn’t yet opened for business yet. Namely the new line from Bangalore to Mangalore via Nelemangala & Hassan, which had been undergoing Read the Rest…
I should have probably paid a lot more attention to what I was doing when planning this trip as I let things slip away that I probably shouldn’t have; although the Jaipur – Sikar MG section closing on 14th November would have been a bit of a bummer had I planned to do it; after Read the Rest…
By them time I’d figured out what I actually wanted to do on this trip I was on about the fifth plan! An original plan had included Khajuraho but as the new section linking Lalitpur to Khajuraho and completing the loop was almost finished that idea got scrapped in favour of heading to Ranchi. The Read the Rest…
With a hand written piece of paper showing everything I want to do in India, I found myself not planning just this trip but also my early 2016 trip at the same time as it became easier to cut and paste between two separate three week trips than it did to try and make what Read the Rest…
Originally this trip plan was hatched to start in Delhi and head north to cover Udhampur; before it was electrified, making it hard to get to Udhampur by Alco. While I was up that way it made sense to pick up some bits of track that as I went along, the bonus bit being the Read the Rest…
With bits of what I wanted to do written down on scraps of paper it took some sorting out to fit it all in and inevitably some bits had to be left out as there just wasn’t time to cram it all in. The trip ultimately became a trek across northern India, all the way Read the Rest…
Prologue My second solo trip to India, hot on the heels of my first one two months previous! I’d had this trip planned in my head for a few years now but it was a trip that didn’t need to be forced as the area it was covering wasn’t either being electrified or having a Read the Rest…
This trip had been planned very early on in the year. I’d had an idea of what i’d wanted to cover well before I put fingers to the keys and got it electronically typed up. It was to be a half re-run of a previously ill fated NE trip to Dibrugarh and would also cover Read the Rest…
This trip was largely a recovery trip based around us missing out on a load of track in Bihar 12 months previous due to Patna Junction’s interlocking system being renewed creating havoc in the area, resulting in very late and cancelled trains making it impossible to plan anything so we’d got out of there. With Read the Rest…
Those of you having read my my India reports from the last couple of years know I’ve had a bit of a rough time of things and had various issues put in my way by Indian Railway’s, and even by God himself to prevent my plans from seeing themselves out the way they should. I’m Read the Rest…
A cracking trip, considering the bad start we had. In fact it was about as shocking as they come. After landing in Delhi and spending the morning freezing our nuts off on the morning commuter trains, we flew to Kolkata with Indian Airlines and went overnight to Malda Town, via Katwa. The following morning we Read the Rest…
This trip was a lot earlier in the year than any of our other trips and as such meant the Monsoon hadn’t quite finished completely. Even at 01:00 on the morning of arrival it was hot and humid in Mumbai…… The day in Mumbai was spent travelling round the local area getting various bits of Read the Rest…
Talk about changing the plan. This trip was one constant change from start to finish, even before we left the country. And all thanks to DLW spitting out WDP4Bs like they were coming into fashion. Thanks to someone spotting the ever reliant Avadh Assam Express with a WDP4 we had to change our plans from Read the Rest…
This is an extract from a longer railway trip of mine but as railway journeys go, the Nilgiri Mountain Railway is well worth getting out of bed for. Friday 3rd March 2017 (A journey on the Nilgiri Mountain Railway to Ooty) It was definitely a rude awakening at 0430 but I was soon into my Read the Rest…
This trip had been planned very early on in the year. Part of it was to cover NE India after an ill-fated trip a couple of years previous resulted in us not getting to the far reaches of Dibrugarh, Ledo & Dangari; the resulting plan had me covering vast distances and crossing the following states Read the Rest…
Having traveled to Bihar a little over 12 months previous with some quite disastrous consequences as far as my travel plans went I was keen not to be beat by a “small” setback and this trip took me pack to Patna where we lost out on a lot of ground on that last trip. It Read the Rest…
This trip was a relatively short one, only 2 weeks, and having flown into Mumbai we traveled through Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu & Karnataka before heading on to Australia from Bangalore. A comprehensive report of my travels can be found here in my Railway section. Maharashtra Andhra Pradesh Kerala Tamil Nadu Karnataka
This selection of photos was taken during a Railway trip to India which covered quite a distance, including the States of West Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan & Haryana. All of my travels in India are by train and my long distance train travel is always booked before flying out to Read the Rest…
We got about a bit on this trip, starting in Mumbai on the west coast we ended up in Puri, Orissa, on the east coast before Jammu Tawi in the North West state of Jammu & Kashmir and ended in Delhi! The highlight had to be seeing the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, during the Read the Rest…
This trip was very hard work indeed but looking back on it after the even I wouldn’t have done anything differently and we managed to beat everything that the Railways threw at us during our journey even if we did almost miss our flight home in the end…….. For the full story please see the Read the Rest…