What was the Revolution of Indian Railway ?

Indian Railways runs a total of 23,000+ trains daily in which 13,000+ are passenger services and 9,200+ services are freight.

Around 20,000 passenger and freight trains run in India, every single day.

The towns and villages that were on the railway line were lucky; they prospered. The others got left behind. The train platform was such a psychological draw that young people went out in the evenings to the platform for chai or paan, or merely to linger there for a whiff of modernity.

The number of movements is even higher if you include maintenance trains and light locomotives traveling on the tracks.

This must have been one of the reasons why ‘platform tickets’ came into being.

At Independence, in 1947, it was more than 50,000 miles long, employing more than a million men, with 9000 locomotives, 225,000 freight cars, and more than 16,000 passenger coaches.

It is difficult to answer this question because all trains do not run daily.

As we noted, the railways had a profound effect on millions of lives as people began to move and merchants began to send their goods to distant parts of the country.

There are weekly,biweekly, alternate day trains etc.

The railways were born of the industrial revolution. The authors of this book begin with a famous quote from Karl Marx, who predicted that railways would create an industrial revolution in India and transform the country.

In addition there also goods trains, local trains, metro rails and special trains for festive seasons.

I learned at university that exchange is natural to human beings, and if you create the conditions for exchange—like infrastructure, such as the railways—economic activity will arise spontaneously.

As per Indian Railway Facts number of passenger trains operated is 14,300.

One should have expected entrepreneurs to respond vigorously in an industrial age, creating small and big industries in the vicinity of the railways; an industrial revolution should have been the result.

This number is open to change because no fixed number of special trains are operated throughout the year.

Our authors inform us that India had 28,000 miles of rail track by 1905, making it the third largest railway network in the world. India also had the world’s largest jute manufacturing industry, the fourth largest cotton textile industry, the largest canal system, and 2.5 per cent of world trade. It also had a merchant class hungry to become industrialists.

The authors of this volume point out that the railway network had neglected freight, and also that its construction had bypassed significant geographical parts of the country. Moreover, India’s agriculture remained stagnant. You cannot have an industrial revolution without an agricultural surplus or the means to feed a rapidly growing urban population.

The Japanese had economized with their limited capital and had built a more geographically intensive network. The Indian railway network, although huge in absolute terms, was comparatively small, in both per-capita and per-square mile terms. In 1937, India had twenty-six miles of railway lines per 1000 square miles of land, when the US had 80 and Germany 253.

It had no such effect in India. Nevertheless, it is a powerful British legacy in a landscape of backwardness. Without the railways, India would have been even less industrialized.

Indian Railways is the largest rail network in Asia and the world’s second largest.

The First train on Indian soil ran between Bombay and Thane on the 16th of April 1853.

The New Delhi Railway Station has secured a place in the Guinness Book of Records for having the world’s largest Route Relay Interlocking System.

Indian Railways transports almost 2.5 crore passengers daily.

Indian Railways is one of the world’s largest employers with over 1.4 million people.

Bhopal Shatabdi Express is the fastest train in India,operates between New Delhi and Bhopal Junction.

Dibrugarh Kanyakumari Vivek Express the longest train route in the Indian Subcontinent.