" Sooner or later we must realize there is no station, no one place to arrive at once and for all. The true joy of life is the trip. "
- Robert J. Hastings
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It is so often that a much...
more...

hyped up journey turns out to be a damper, whereas an otherwise travel presumed to be mundane and ordinary, turns out to be full of surprises. Unpredictability is the very essence of travelling, and every journey is an altogether experience. And it is this experiences that we learn from, for there cannot be a greater teacher than 'Experience', the old adage of 'Once bitten twice shy' being so true......
And talking of experiences, what grander experiences can one have whilst travelling in a train run by the Indian Railways! Different colours, smell, language,clothing, greenery, landscape...you name it, India has it and Indian Railways gives you the best seat to experience it all! Indeed India is the land of diversity and the 'Indian Railways' is the very soul of it! Take out a person from the Kashmir valley and put him beside a guy from Tamil Nadu, you will probably notice no similarity between them except their obvious same nationalities! What you may notice is an ageless WDM-2 tirelessly puttering away on the 'Baramulla-Srinagar line' with a freight load in tandem , the very next week you may find the same loco seamlessly chugging across the sea on the Pamban bridge with the 'Island Express' in tow. There are very things that can unite two Indians like Indian Railways, and this is a role that IR has seamlessly played on since independence!
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23/07/2017
Trip Link :- /diary/trip/113352
Train :- 13152 JAT-KOAA Express (Formerly Pathankot- Sealdah Express)
I awoke to a very wet morning at Topchanchi, a very scenic and popular picnic spot in Dhanbad district bordering the neighbouring Giridih district, where I had gone to visit a friend the night before. Normally a beautiful place with abundance of forest and greenery, the beauty of the place was enhanced several times several times under a cloudy sky. For the past few days, due to a massive depression, the entire Indian subcontinent has been pretty much battered with incessant rains , so much that railway and airline operations have had to be shut down in some parts of Gujrat and Rajasthan. Thankfully nothing catastrophic has happened so far on the eastern front excepting that bridge collapse near Rayagada, and a similar incident near BBU on the GC !
Regardless of the breathtaking view, I couldn't simply sit back and enjoy it as I had to accompany my father to Kolkata that very morning. Our reservations were from Dhanbad, but reaching Dhanbad around 40+ kms on a rain drenched NH-2 was a far less appealing proposition that hoping on my friend's bike for a short trip to Gomoh Junction (10 kms)...
Gomoh junction is arguably the single most important station on the Grand Chord section of the HWH-DLI, controlling the rail traffic of three different state capitals simutaneously. Historically Gomoh was the de-facto station of the erstwhile 'Manbhum' district of undivided Bengal. An important railway township flourishes around this very important railway station.
Right! The train arrived at 10:50 approximately delayed over just an hour, crew change was quick and efficient. I caught hold of TTE and on re-telling him my dilema, he gave me a thumbs up to board my berth from GMO itself as it had already been vacated at KQR !
It was quite a picturesque view at GMO, freights moving in tandem from the UP, WAG-9s and WAG-7s being tended to at the ELS, and their were loads of linesmen and grade 4 staff, all catching a breather, and waiting for their next assignment, most likely the reversal of BWN-HTE passenger set to arrive soon from DHN side! The closure of the DC line has meant that the workload on GMO has been increased multifold!
Watching this unfold right infront of my eyes meant that I had almost forgotten the instant when the MGS WAP-4 gave a loud honk and started off with towards DHN side..... Tha startup was rather subdued and the acceleration pitifully almost non-existent, and I was expecting a docile run till DHN and beyond because of the already substantial delay it had accumulated! Having said that, i still believed we would reached Chitpur on time owing to the substantial slack that has been provided for in the TT of this train....
BOY, I was so wrong about the 'docile run' part! No sooner had we crossed the junction points, from where the ADRA lines diverge, than the WAP-4 started accelerating madly and blaring it's horns like a mad-men was incharge of it! 15-115 in around 2 minutes with a 22 coached ICF, this are accleration figures that you except from a WAP-7! But even with 1320 horses less than it's 3 phaser counterpart, the MGS WAP-4 was comfortably at-home tugging at my train and accelerating quickly upto MPS. Matari came and went by in a flash... And then came the shakes!
Being a regular passenger in the KOAA-DHN section in the Durgiana during it's ICF days, I am able to distinguish the shakes occuring in the ICF rakes post 110, I even have a crude practice to determine the speed at which the coaches, a method that I perfected on the Durgiana Express! I had observed that at 110 I could somehow stand without support, at 115-120 I simply couldnot, if the train does around 120, then your legs don't stop shaking even on the train's decleration :P!
i used this technique quite a lot during my B-tech days when I did not have a smartphone, my good old Nokia C1-01 sadly didn't have location services back then. And it was quite effective as well. Anyone who has been on the Durgiana will agree that train runs like a possessed beast, and gets a royal priority on ER, ECR & NR throughout...
I used this technique often in Coalfield, Agnibeena, Durgiana, Saare Jahan se Ache and a phlethora of other trains sometimes maybe at the expense of passengers who may genuinely be in the need of the toilet more than I did!
Although I confess my method is a guess at best and has more inherent faults than merits still it was remarkably effective! I was still contemplating the nostalagia of those days when I realised that Tetulmari had passed in a blur....Bhuli followed suit soon enough and exactly at the nineteenth minute from the departure time at Gomoh, we were crossing the 'Gaya Pool' and into Dhanbad by the 20th minute! It was an astounding run by a train of 13152's standard or as a matter for any ICF train, even when considering the normally high benchmarks set for the MGS-DHN divisions of the GC section. Such a run can be expected for a high priotised SF, for a crawler like JAT-KOAA it was simply astounding!
Enter Dhanbad, looking ravishing as ever under the cloudy skies, but now stripped of it's junction status! Our train was accorded platform number 1, BWN-HTE passenger on 5 had an apparent loco failure and it was getting it's locomotive replaced. Black was getting shunted from platform number 2, HWH WAP-7 led and astoundingly late SDAH-AII arrived on platform 3, BQA-DHN MEMU was parked on the adjacent platform 1A! This train manges to get a good patronage upto DHN inspite of traversing the tedious BJE-PEH route....
10 minutes had passed and after a brisk period of business for the hawkers, the rush has subsidised and yet our train showed no signs of moving. Getting down on the platform, I was greeted by two things, one, a hail of rain which has resumed after a brisk break, and two, utter commotion near the locomotive! Apparently the BWN-HTE wasn't the only casualty, the locomotive of our train had also refused to move on it's own after stopping at Dhanbad. After a while, another crimson MGS WAP-4 was duely attached to our train and after an extended halt of 20 mins we started moving!
Post Dhanbad run, was pretty uneventful. On-time HWH WAP-4 led Poorva xed us at Kalubathan The handover to ER was done perfectly as our train reached KMME at 12:05! KMME is the last station on the Grand Chord lying in Jharkhand state and also happens to be the hometown to two cherished members of this site, Rajeev Sir and Sanjeev Sir!
Barakar and Kulti passed smoothly soon after, and it had started raining very heavily, forcing me to abandon my doorplating, and returning to my berth, only to find my father having started an amicable chatter with a 'Sadhu-baba' on the opposite seat! My father introduced us and soon enough we started chatting. I was pleasantly surprised to see 'Baba' quite knowledgable in the affairs of the Indian Railways, when I had gone back to my seat berth, he was explaining the concept of dynamic fares to my father, my father is a complete novice regarding railways, and as such he was listening quite attentively to 'Baba'! When I returned, he introduced us and remarked that we would get along well together! And true enough, 'Baba' and I had started chatting soon on a variety of topics, namely 'flexi-fare and the disadvantages', ' how cheap aviation was cutting into the railway revenues', ' the stubborn refusal by railways to hike up the prices of UR & sleeper class whilst seamlessly hiking up the fares of the AC classes', 'Railways during his youth and now' and so on! Baba also told me his biography between DGR & BWN and revealed himself to be 83 to my utter surprise, as he looked to be in sixties !!!
Time flew fast, and soon enough ASN was upon us, a quick glance at the passing ASN ELS confirmed my suspicions, no interesting spottings, just the usual loco crowd! The usual rush was a tid subdued today mainly due to the continous downpour. The halt at ASN was brief and soon enough we were accelerating out of ASN, when I decided to climb up to my SU berth! But as luck would have it, our train was detained at Kaliphari. When our train did not move for over 20 minutes, I got out of the coach only to be informed by 2 onduty RPFs that there was a traffic block at place and it would be cleared at 2:10 PM! Dissapointed by this, I climbed up on my berth and relaxed into sleep......
When I got up and 'Baba' had gone missing......
What happened? Stay tuned for part two :)

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