The Other Railway Children Chapter 11 (extract) "The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway"

Railway Children’s interest in north east India began after Edith Wilkins had moved to Darjeeling. Through her and the railway contacts I had, I was invited to a joint UNESCO/Indian Railways conference in January 2002 which was to discuss the earlier announcement that the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (DHR) had been designated a ‘World Heritage Site’. The conference was held in January in Ghum, the highest point of the DHR where it reached 7,400’ before dropping down to Darjeeling which lay at 6,800’ above sea level.

The hotel had been specially opened up for the conference as resorts in the hills were closed in the non-tourist season and was freezing cold. I remember that the four of us - Mrinalini Rao, our Country Director, a consultant who worked with us on issues in the area and a representative from an Indian charity working at Siliguri, a city at the foot of the valley - used to meet in one of the small bedrooms for pre-session briefing and huddled round a one-bar electric fire in what we named ‘penguin order’, in a reference to the TV pictures one sees of King Penguins huddled together against the Antarctic storms. We managed to persuade Mrinalini to get up at 6 o’clock one morning to see the sunrise over Kanchenjunga opposite, the third highest mountain in the world at over 28,000 feet. It was a splendid sight bathed in the early pink rays of the sun. I realised that it was the first time she had ever seen frost which crunched under our feet as we strode to the best viewpoint.

The purpose of our presence at the conference was to respond to UNESCO’s expectation that local people should benefit from the ‘World Heritage Site’ status of the ‘toy railway’ as it was known locally and that we should put forward ideas in the sessions on how to involve children in the area, especially the poorest, so that there was a developing local ownership of the railway and its income generating potential for those most in need of it. The Indian Railway officers present were talking of investment in the line to improve its tourism potential, including renewing its ancient locomotive fleet and possibly building new engines to the1880s design. We visited stations at Kurseong and Darjeeling to look at the potential for station improvements and their possible adoption and decoration by local school children.

In fact, the daily school train from Kurseong to Darjeeling and return was still hauled by one of the ancient British built steam engines and after one of our Darjeeling station inspection tours I travelled back the 5 uphill miles to Ghum in the school train behind a leaking and wheezing No. 791 designed by Sharp Stewart & Co of Glasgow and built by the North British Loco Company, also of Glasgow, in 1914. We progressed so slowly that the school children kept hopping off the train and racing ahead of it, then jumping back on. We managed to drop a quarter of an hour on our one hour 5mph schedule demonstrating the urgent need of attention from the Indian railway authorities. Edith Wilkins made us aware of the vulnerability of children in the area - the disease in the poorly maintained slums during the monsoon and winter seasons and the trafficking of children over the borders nearby with Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, and Bangladesh through Assam.

When the conference was over, I visited some informal schools at locations at the lower end of the route at Sukna and Siliguri Town stations and Edith took me to see the Truck Stand community in the old DHR Siliguri Goods Shed which was probably the worst slum I have ever encountered. The conditions were truly dreadful, unhygienic and overpowering, but Edith mingled with the drug addicts, the women with AIDS, the naked toddlers, hugging everyone and picking up and cradling the children. Everyone swarmed round her, treating her as a visiting angel. The issue was how could the development of the DHR really be made to help such people as these. The more likely scenario was that their homes - awful as they were - would be removed as part of any clean up to improve its attractiveness for tourists. UNESCO officials had been adamant at the conference that one of the purposes of granting ‘World Heritage’ status to the DHR was to preserve the line and improve the lot of the local people who lived on and round it.

Back in Delhi later, as a follow up to the DHR conference, I was invited by the Indian Railways Heritage Director, Mr A.K.Agarwal, who organized the Ghum conference, to an event at the National Railway Museum, a splendid open site with a treasury of locomotives and coaches from the British Raj and later. The day was attended by the Chairman of Indian Railways and his wife to formally cut the tape for the first run in steam since preservation of India’s first steam locomotive, the 1853 built ‘Faery Queen’ which the Chairman’s wife, Mrs Mahotra, drove up and down a hundred yard stretch of track with the footplate full of notables.

I managed to have a word with the Chairman about my agenda for co-operation with Indian railway officials and he promised support - but as so often happens in the Indian civil service, he had retired within weeks before any concrete action promised had taken place. I had a meeting with his successor, Mr R.J.Singh, later which I thought might be more fruitful. Increased co-operation from the RPF in particular did become apparent in the following months, but whether anything was a result of our meeting I shall never know. I did get an Indian Railway Museum tie for my pains which I now wear frequently to suitable events.

A further connection is now support from the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway Society in the UK for the Railway Children, which has included original water colour paintings for our Christmas cards by the DHR Society Chairman, David Charlesworth. These always include at least one DHR scene - with children - which are very popular, not only with DHR Society members.