The Himalayan tea train that's running out of steam
The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway once took precious tea from the foothills of the mountains to the teapots of the world. But it's become a victim of the colossal inefficiency of the state-run system and is facing a slow extinction through neglect, says David Baillie.
When a man
who grows tea that sells for more than $2,000 (£1,300) a kilogram
offered me a breakfast cuppa, I expected the golden rules of warming the
pot and using boiling water.
But even though Rajah Banerjee owns the exclusive Makaibari tea estate near Darjeeling, golden rules are not for him.
"Good
tea is like good wine and needs oxygen to breathe," he insists.
"Boiling suffocates the flavour." So Banerjee lets the water stand in a
pot without a lid for several minutes before he eventually spoons in the
tea.
My cup is filled several times
from the lidless teapot as he expands on his personal philosophy of tea
and life, an eclectic mix of Hinduism, Rudolf Steiner, and the Slow Food
movement of distant Tuscany.
But Banerjee's latest passion is the
decaying Darjeeling Himalayan Railway - a narrow-gauge relic of the Raj
that once took Makaibari tea from the Himalayan foothills to the Bengal
Plains, from where it was shipped to the mainly lidded teapots of the
world.
Built in 1879, the 48 mile (88km) line is now a loss-making
anachronism that clings to life through the threads of its history and
an aversion to the political bother of closure.
Looked
down on by portraits of the four generations of his family who have
nurtured the Makaibari estate, Banerjee is defiant. "Without investment
it will die. But with investment it can strengthen tourism, and the
whole community will benefit." Jabbing the table with his finger he
adds, "And I can make that investment." Then the passion deflates. "But
the government will not let me."
Banerjee's view is shared by many
who know the region. There are a couple of token tourist steam services
optimistically called the Joy Trains. The most popular shuttles back
and forth along the five mile (7km) litter-strewn urban sprawl between
Darjeeling and neighbouring Ghum.
The tatty cramped carriages have
smoked plastic windows which have become so scratched as to be almost
opaque. You can open them by sliding them back, but this merely adds
your layer of scratched plastic to the already diminished view of a
fellow passenger behind.
The steam locomotives thankfully have
more charm than their carriages, but are now more than 100 years old and
in need of expert and tender care rather than the desperate emergency
repairs I witnessed involving the use of crowbars and sledge hammers.
An erratic diesel service, ironically with more tourist friendly windows, continues on a further 16 miles (26km) to the town of Kurseong but only one train a day makes the journey down to the plains and the connection to the main line.
This
section had been closed for several years until March this year. The
official reason was because of a landslide but everyone from the chief
engineer to station masters gave me their own additional theories.
Even
the security guard who frisked me as I left from nearby Bogdogra
Airport had an explanation. He insisted, somewhat too cheerily, that it
was because of the suicide of a fare-dodging passenger. Since the fare
for the whole 48 miles is less than 48 pence and hardly worth dodging,
let alone dying for, this seemed a little improbable.
The reality
is that it is the railway that is committing suicide from a lack of
investment. In the engineering workshop, ancient lathes and machine
tools lie idle or broken as the skills to use them are lost with
retiring workers, few of whom are replaced.
The most active engineering I witnessed was an earnest young man building a detailed model of one of the locos out of a sheet of tin.
So why
is the Government Railway Board in distant Delhi so reluctant to hand
the loss-making line to the likes of Rajah Banerjee, who would aim to
offer tourists a ride along the whole 7,000ft (2,000m) climb into the
mountains with hopefully a reasonable window to look out of?
Almost
everyone I spoke to believed that the answer is the political cost of
privatising even the tiniest outpost of India's monolithic state-owned
railway. More than a million people work for Indian Railways and their
unions fiercely oppose any privatisation.
It's a fight no-one has
the stomach for, preferring instead eventual closure by the attrition
of old age and retirement, of both people and locomotives.
