Steam engines! How can one forget their eerie whistle in the middle of the night? Now that the Railway Museum in Chanakyapuri is holding an exhibition on steam locos, the new generation, more accustomed to diesel engines, will get a chance to enjoy the charm of the old locomotives that ran through the length and breadth of the country for a hundred years and more. One remembers Joe Hudson, a veteran engine driver, who had lost a leg in a train accident and even while on crutches (a la, Long John Silver) could not stop speaking of his experiences as a young jack who shovelled coal to keep the engine blazing and later qualify as a goods train driver before driving express trains.
Hudson was stationed in Delhi for long years and recalled that drivers in those pre-partition days always sought blessings from the little masjid in between the tracks at Delhi Station. Gossip associated this mosque with the mid-19 century days when thugs were believed to pray there before embarking on their ruthless strangling missions after Dussehra every year.
Hudson had a fund of stories which he related lying bare-bodied on a cot, his crutches resting near the pillow. One story he was never tired of relating was associated with an incident in Acchnera tehsil after he had switched over to Western Railway and running up to Jaipur from the Agra Fort Station. One night as he was heading for Bharatpur, he saw a man carrying a woman in his arms and crossing the track despite several warning whistles. It was a moonlit night and the man, a villager with a turban on his head, was so oblivious of the danger he faced that he never made any effort to escape certain death. Hudson applied the brakes but it took time for the engine to come to a halt and in the meantime the train ran over the man and the woman. Jumping down from his seat he found no bodies on the track and looked around to see if they had been blown off to the side where there was a low ditch but he found no trace of the victims. However in the field that lay ahead he saw the man still carrying the woman in the bright moonlight. Hudson was sure the train had run over the two. “Then how the hell did they escape so fast as to be 100 yards from the tracks?” Hudson remarked. He continued to puzzle over the mystery years after the incident and one explanation offered was that on a moonlit night in 1930 a man and a woman were run over by a train on its way to Phalera via Acchnera. Their apparition sometimes appeared on the track and startled drivers.
Another incident he related was about a girl who always ran out of her village after midnight. She stood and watched the train pass by before shaking her head and retracing her steps homewards. One enterprising engine driver had stopped his train and followed the girl for some distance. He saw an old man coming out to meet the girl and than lead her away. The driver, Sunny, asked in broken Hindi why the girl behaved in that way. The old man's reply was that she had fallen in love with an engine fireman who had once lived in the village. One day he just disappeared and never came back. The girl declined to get married and at night would rush out in quest of her lost lover whenever she heard a late night train approaching the village. This incident occurred a few miles from Delhi on the Ghaziabad-Tundla stretch.
The Chanakyapuri museum, alas, will not be able to recreate the magic of Hudson's nostalgic tales at the scheduled exhibition.
