A wealth of information about Indian Railways is in store at the photo exhibition organised in view of its 160th year of operation, at Madurai Railway junction.
With 28 photographs on display, it gives a preview of the origin, tradition and evolution of the world’s fourth largest railway network which is functioning under a single administration.
The Indian Railways operates 11,000 trains every day, covering a distance equal to thrice the distance between the earth and the moon.
The railways which made possible the 34-km-long journey between Mumbai and Thane on April 16, 1853, now has a 63,940-km-long network.
Every day, trains carry 2.20 crore people in the country, which is more than the population of Norway, Sweden and Denmark put together.
Another striking feature of the railways, as displayed in the exhibition, is its golden square connecting the four metros – New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. Though the track length of the golden square amounts to only 16 per cent of the entire network, it carries half of the total passenger and cargo movements.
A photo caption states while 14 coaches were in the train that made the first journey in India, express trains now have 24 coaches, running for close to half a km, and carry 1,500 passengers.
Vivek Express, which is connecting Kanyakumari with Dibrugarh in the north-east, records the longest journey of 4,200 kilometres after 82 hours of travel.
It is juxtaposed with the Moscow-Rome train journey, covering one of the longest distances in Europe – which is only 2,380 km.
Another pride of the railways is that it has got three railway networks — Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, Kalka-Shimla Railway and the Nilgiris Mountain Railway — which have been declared as Heritage Railway by UNESCO.
The expo, which also highlights some of the railway plants where locomotives, coaches, wheels and axles are being manufactured, will remain open between 8.30 a.m. and 6 p.m. till April 2. The entry is free.
Divisional Railway Manager A.K. Rastogi inaugurated the exhibition on Sunday in the presence of Additional Divisional Railway Manager V. Ajith Kumar.
