The immersive joys of train travel
@trains.of.bharat, is a trainspotter’s delight, with videos of WDG-4Gs and WDS-6s thundering past platforms and the clickety-clack of wheels on tracks. To him, railway staff such as loco pilots and guards, who guide thousands of people to different destinations everyday, “are actually heroes similar to army jawans." Kannan too describes memorable conversations with motormen and invitations to peek into the locomotive’s cabin. “Motormen are very friendly and will happily explain controls and dials.
In 2006, I got to ride a WDM2 with two locomotive pilots, who taught me a lot about a diesel locomotive. That experience changed my life and I understood how hard and challenging their lives are. I would go a step further and say that a locomotive pilot’s job is harder than an airplane pilot’s job." Childhood trips from Mumbai to Kolkata on trains started Arpan Mitra’s lifelong love affair.
The officer in a private bank is particularly interested in the designs of locomotives, railway coaches and goods carriages, the different pantographs (the triangular connection to the overhead power lines), colour schemes and numbers. Mitra is now an active member of an Indian Railways fan club group on Facebook. He too can recognise locomotives by their sound.
“Since I have watched trains for many years, I can recognize a locomotive model from its horn and generator sound, even at a distance," he says, explaining, “if it makes a humming sound like an aircraft, we can identify the locomotive as an electromotive diesel such as the WDP4 or WDG4. We can differentiate the sound of wheels on tracks and tell if it is a freight, passenger, mail or express train. For rail enthusiasts, the combination of loud blasts of the horn, the rhythmic
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