Title - Ode to 160 years on tracks

Bhubaneswar, Aug. 1:An ongoing photography exhibition at the Railway Stadium in Mancheswar is commemorating 160 years of Indian railways. The week long exhibition was inaugurated on Tuesday evening.
There are around 250 black and white pictures that are divided into different categories such as wagons and carriages, railway stations, personalities, railway bridges and tunnels et al. The exhibition picks interesting moments, primarily from the first 100 years of railway’s existence. The photographs are sourced from railway archives, Press Information Bureau and railway museums.
The daily commuters may miss the architectural beauty of stations, but the wide-angle clicks of the stations brilliantly display their grandeur.
The tangas (horse cart) waiting outside Allahabad station, the façade of Victoria Terminus, Howrah station and Madras Central all remind of how railways cannot be separated from our social fabric.
The pictures also tell about the renovations in ticket counters, dormitories, catering systems and others that took place gradually rendering the stations their present day look.
Then there also pictures of evolution of trains from steam engines to metro train where transition from wooden coaches to centrally air-conditioned ones has been achieved.
A section has also been dedicated to workmen, who have worked tirelessly to keep the mode of transportation that connects a million lives everyday in fine feathers. The pictures of trains passing through barren land of Kutch, hilly terrains of Darjeeling, over a submerged track or inside a tunnel also regale one and all.
But it is the personality section that evokes much appreciation. Jawaharlal Nehru at Bhadrak station, Mahatma Gandhi giving a his speeches at various stations, Bhagat Singh at Lahore Railway Police Station, the three generations of the Nehru-Gandhi family (Jawaharlal, Indira and Rajiv) at a station interested the visitors.
Another interesting anecdote is that Rabindranath Tagore wrote six poems of Gitanjali during a train journey. A couple of sections also show trains that found their way onto stamps and currency notes across the globe.
To interest the children, a miniature model of a train is also part of the exhibition. “My train journeys with family have always been very memorable. I have brought my son to the exhibition so that he can get acquainted with the glorious history of Indian railways,” said Prabhat Behera, a visitor.