October 20, 2022: There is a certain romance attached to train timetables that is difficult to explain to non-enthusiasts of railway systems. And it is a romance that in India at least, remains undimmed even in an era of competition from free online services and mobile phone apps.
‘The vocabulary of Bradshaw is nervous and terse, but limited’ complained Sherlock Holmes the fictional detective to his friend Dr Watson about their most used companion, the printed compilation of British train timings, first brought out in 1839 by George Bradshaw and continually published till 1961.
This week, the Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has brought out the 43rd edition of “Trains at a Glance”, the railway time table of Indian Railways, after a gap of three years – the nearest we have to our own Bradshaw. It is the biggest edition so far – 2 cms thick with just over 400 large format pages all in colour -- helpfully indexed multiple ways so that you can search for a particular train by its number, name or by looking up a route map.
Around mid-September, IRCTC sent out mailers, inviting interested persons to pre order copies for the cover price of Rs 100 plus speed post charges of Rs 60 anywhere in India. Thousands did. You can order a copy here.
With one of the world’s largest train networks –70,225 kms – serving more people-per-kilometre than anywhere else in the world --20,424 – India’s Railways plays a unique role in the lives of her citizens. Even casual users find utility in having an up-to-date time table at their side – and technology has not dented this market.
Yes, a simple Google search on your mobile phone will get you specific information about a train and even help you reserve a seat – but for Indian rail aficionados there is something very personal about a printed time table: a promise of endless tracks untraveled, exotic destinations unseen.
Prior to 1976, the Railways brought out divisional time tables of each of the then nine geographical divisions and also issued what was known as an All-India Railway Time Table. This was just a collection of all the divisional editions thrown together – with no attempt to recast the contents so that a single train route could be followed end to end in one table. The Trains at a Glance or TAG solved this problem but till today, it lists only express trains, leaving the passenger trains to the divisional time tables that are now reduced to 6. They have become difficult to get and TAG remains the only all-India train guide today.
It has improved sharply over the years and the latest edition, contains all essential information for train travellers, like full schedules of some 1400 trains, reservation and cancellation information as well as details of many special trains and tourist packages, down to the detailed menus that are catered on every train.Sensible colour coding makes it easy to distinguish and follow the routes of mail, express, superfast and special trains like Rajdhani, Shatabdi, Jan Shatabdi, Duronto and Garib Rath. The newly introduced Vande Bharat trains are listed but not yet identified in the charts (though the number has grown since publication of the guide to four, with the fifth, Mysuru – Bengaluru – Chennai), due to start on November 10.
Online timetables
TAG-2022 is also available for free, online (read here). IRCTC has listed all online divisional time tables pertaining to 6 railway divisions as well as the local or suburban trains in Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Kolkata and Hyderabad. They can be found here.
Train enthusiasts will recall that India had its own “Bradshaw”, first published in 1868. Titled the “Indian Bradshaw”, it had no known links with the British Bradshaw and was brought out from Kolkata by W. Newman and Co. It remained for many decades, the only guide to passenger trains in pre-Independence India and continued to publish its annual editions till quite recently. An excellent blog titled “The Decline of the Indian Bradshaw” (read here) traces the publication right up to 2017 reproducing the cover of the 2016 edition. It is not clear if the publication has appeared since – and this correspondent would be happy to update this piece with any information that readers especially in Kolkata may have about any later editions of Indian Bradshaw.
Even when the original UK Bradshaw ceased publication, Thomas Cook the travel people, used to bring out two railway timetables, a European Rail Time table and the Overseas Time Table covering other countries in US, Australia Asia including time table for India. That too ceased in August 2013. However former Thomas Cook employees bought the rights to the title and today their company, brings out a jumbo-sized annual tome called European Rail Time Table (ERT) costing around $ 40 (Rs 3200). In a section called Beyond Europe, they also cover important trains in India.
The question: Why would anyone ever buy a printed time table in this Connected Age when everything is available online -- is contemptuously swept aside by fans of Indian Railways for whom a train journey is not merely a way to get from here to there.