RailEnquiry

PATNA: About 17,000 people have visited Bharatiya Nritya Kala Mandir so far to have a look at the photo exhibition put up by East Central Railway (ECR) to mark the 160 years of Indian Railways. The exhibition is a repository of rare photographs of Railways right from 1853 to the present time. There are about 250 photographs at this exhibition which will conclude on Monday.

A visit to the photo exhibition gives an idea of how the Indian Railways has been progressing since its first run on April 16, 1853, between Bori Bundar (Mumbai) and Thane. There was a time when shunting engine was hardly available to haul passenger train rake or goods train in the yard. Railways had then adopted a novel idea to keep elephants on the payrolls of railways and they were used in place of locomotives to push the coach or a rake in the yard for shunting purpose. The rare photographs in black and white in which elephants are shown pushing rake or coach attracted attention of the visitors, especially schoolchildren who were visiting the photo exhibition almost everyday.

The youth and children throng the exhibition to view the rare photos of ‘refugee special train’ during partition of India in 1947. People was shown sitting on the roofs of the train which came from Pakistan to Amritsar and Ambala during partition.

The exhibition show is a thrill for the visitors who found it highly informative and educative. Railways has been a mode of transport for every section of the society during pre and post independence era. Rare photographs of Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru, Netaji Subash Chandra Bose, Nizam of Hyderabad, Lord Linlithgow, Dr S Radhakrishnan, Babu Jagjivan Ram, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Satyajit Ray, Rajiv Gandhi and many others were the cynosure of all eyes. A rare photograph of Patna Junction in 1939 is also displayed.

Various models of locomotives right from 1853, coaches of passenger trains including the modern LHB coaches, the biggest railway yard of Mughalsarai, upcoming Patna-Sonepur rail-cum-road bridge over the Ganga, Harnaut coach maintenance workshop, Chhapra wheel factory, saloon of Darbhanga Maharaj, 1906 tunnel in Maharashtra, flood situation at Patna Junction, 1920 passenger engine, steam engine bearing National anthem, models of Victoria Terminus, old Delhi and Madras stations in 1873 are other highlights of the railway photo exhibition, said ECR CPRO Amitabh Prabhakar.