Chugging through the Nilgiris
Rajnish Wattas

THE 662 Up Nilgiri Express is scheduled to reach Conoor at 10.25 hours. It’s already one hour late, but Manoj Varma, the friendly Station Superintendent, is not worried. He assures us that the train would be there soon. Life on the quaint railways runs at an unhurried pace. The romance of travelling in these slow-moving hill trains is because their languid pace enables one to savour the landscape around to the utmost.

The Conoor Railway Station located at 6,000 ft. height is a magnificent old stone building and marks the culmination of the 19km distance from Kallar; during which the railway climbs 4,363 ft. and the line crosses lofty viaducts, bridges and tunnels. As part of its heritage, the Nilgiri Express is still hauled up to Conoor with the ol’ ‘iron horse,’ an antique Swiss-made steam locomotive, and is as pictorial to day, as it was perhaps nearly a century ago. No wonder, it inspired even the famous Hollywood film director David Lean, to picturise the ‘toy train’ to Ooty (now called Udagamandlam) in his film A Passage to India, based on E.M. Forster’s famous 1924 classic.

As the signal comes down with the train finally approaching, the somnolent station awakens to a flurry of activity. Suddenly puffs of blue-black smoke are seen on the horizon, there is a strong whiff of burning coal in the air and from a distance one can hear the huff-an’-puff of the old chuffer hauling up the train. At last, the quaint blue-and-cream train steams into the station. Passengers disembark for a brief stroll and amble down the platform to enjoy steaming hot cups of coffee and spicy vadas.

The Nilgiri Railway, a legacy of the British is not only a great travel experience but also a marvellous engineering feat. To climb up the steep gradients, the train is pushed and not pulled by the locomotive. Each coach has a projecting balcony from where the brakeman operates special handbrakes, in addition to the vacuum brakes operated by the engine driver. The two communicate with each other by an ingenious code system of whistles and flags. And it runs on the famous rack-rail system, which consists of two toothed steel bars laid in a double row above the running rails. This ensures that the engine pinions do not work off on the racks when negotiating the curves.

The track from Conoor onwards, is without rack railway and now run by a diesel locomotive, so that the train speed is faster along this stretch. With the increase in altitude, the air becomes nippy and the mountains get wrapped in cold mist. The "clang"of the rails becomes a rhythmic rhapsody and the deep forests cast playful dapples of light and shadow. You glide past cultivated terraces dotted with hamlets, and after an hour-and-a-half from Conoor, you are at the very English sounding station called Lovedale. The weather suddenly becomes inclement. The sky is overcast with dark menacing clouds and a few sharp showers make it very cold.

The Nilgiri Express takes one last sharp turn, let’s out a shrill ‘toot,’ and you chug into the Queen of the Mountains – Ooty. The ride is more than just a train trip; it’s a journey down memory lane, running on the tracks of nostalgia of a bygone era.

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