Three coaches, each a tad smaller than a city bus, are tugged by a miniature engine running at a snail’s pace of 15km an hour. The stations, also referred to as ‘halts’, have no platforms and passengers wait alongside the tracks.
This is the world of light rails, a colonial legacy once managed by McLeod & Company of the UK.
Connecting a 27km stretch of rural hinterland in Burdwan, about 150km from Kolkata, is Bengal’s last and one of the country’s few surviving narrow gauge (2ft 6 inches) passenger train services of the Eastern Railway.
McLeod & Company had set up four such narrow-gauge lines around Calcutta in phases from 1915, during World War I.
Three routes have already been shut down and the last of them, from the sleepy town of Katwa to Balgona in Burdwan district, was also closed on December 1 for conversion to broad gauge.
The broad gauging will cost ₹123 crore and is expected to be completed over the next two years.
While most passengers welcome the change — the conversion will cut travel time by half, from two hours to one — those working with the trains are overwhelmed by nostalgia.
“They were like my sons,” says Mohammed Inamul, who has been taking care of the archaic machines for 35 years.
Photographs by Ashoke Chakraborty and text by Abhishek Law