Indian Railways

[raniraja]

Received an email forward interesting enough for this space.

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1. Indian Railway is constructing the highest rail bridge over Chenab, in J&K - Five times the height of Qutub Minar, it will be taller than the Eiffel Tower.

2. Loco-pilots (train drivers) are paid more than an average software engineer. Salaries are the tune of Rs. 1 Lakh per month and more.

3. No loco-pilot has abandoned the train even in the face of certain death

4. The Indian Railways website gets close to 12 Lakh hits per minute Hourly traffic on IRTC.com is more than annual traffic of some of the most popular Indian websites. It can support almost 5 million threads at one time.

5. The slowest train goes uphill at the speed of 10 kilometers per hour. You can jump off the train, light up a smoke, take few drags and climb on the train again. It’s the Mettupalayam Ooty Nilgiri Passenger train.

6. If the tracks of Indian railways were to be laid out, they would circle the earth almost 1.5 times

7. The trains got toilets after Indian Railways completed about 50 years! Back then, passengers had to wait till the next station to answer the call of nature! Thank Okhil Chandra for making Indian Railways do the needful. He wrote the letter to Indian Railways and finally, there were toilets in 1909!

8. Back in the old days, elephants were used to position the carriages

9. Its 161 years old! 16 TH April, 1853.

10. The station with the longest name is Venkatanarasimharajuvaripeta
And it’s sometimes spelled with ‘Sri’ prefixed.

11. Most unreliable train in Indian Railways is Guwahati-Trivandrum Express. It is late on an average by ten to twelve hours. Gosh!

12. The longest tunnel in the country is 11.215 kilometers long! It is the Pir Panjal Railway tunnel in Jammu and Kashmir.

13. The station with the smallest name is called ‘IB ’: It’s in Odisha

14. Before installing Automatic Point System, hundreds of guards lost their hands and fingers trying to fix it manually. Every time a train got delayed and we complained,
an Indian Railways employee probably lost his limbs for us

15. The longest running train covers a distance of 4273 km between Dibrugarh
and Kanyakumari: It’s called the Vivek Express

16. The shortest distance covered between two successive stations is 3
kilometers. It’s between the Nagpur and Ajni station.

17. A train covers a distance of 528 km without a single stop. It’s Trivandrum – H. Nizamuddin Rajdhani Express.

18. Lucknow is the busiest junction in the nation: 64 trains come in and move
out, every day

19. A massively successful organization – running 11,000 trains

20. Indian Railways transports almost 2.5 crore passengers daily. That’s nearly the total population of New Zealand, Australia and Tasmania put together!

21. The Rail Museum in Delhi is the largest in Asia. It has working and non-working models both.

22. The railway station of Navapur is built in two states; half in Maharashtran
and the rest is in Gujarat

23. Indian Railways has a mascot – Bholu, the Guard Elephant

24. Rly stn HILLI (north bengal), the eastern platform is in Bangladesh,western platform is in India!

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At some point in future, I may also post some complaints about Indian Railways here.

[sgars]

I used to visit frequently IRFCA website for Indian Railways Fan Club.
many of the points are correct, but i do not think Point 18 is correct. Nagpur, Vijayawada or Itarsi would be busier.

[Napolean]

interesting read.

[sarv_shaktimaan]

Itarsi may be busiest i think.

#2 may be wrong, i know somebody who worked as a loco driver all his life, retired couple years back and didn't earn a whole lot. His family was lower middle class.

Reminds me few years ago this train went over some pilgrims in India and people lynched the driver. This acquaintance of mine went into depression on hearing the news.

One fact missed is:

Indian Railways is the world's seventh largest commercial or utility employer, by number of employees, with over 1.307 million employees.