Take a Ride on One of India's Legendary Mountain Railways | National Geographic

less than 1m read

·Nov 11, 2024

[Music] The rugged mountainous terrain of India contains unmatched adventure. Their three historic railways are grouped into a single World Heritage site known as the Mountain Railways of India. The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, the Nilgiri Mountain Railway, and the Kalka Shimla Railway are a Holy Trinity for train aficionados. But they're more than just relics of British colonization; all three are still fully operational today, and a ride on any of them reveals the incredible engineering that connected these rugged locales.

The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, often called the toy train because of its diminutive size, opened in 1881. The serpentine track gained serious altitude by employing an endless series of switchbacks, hairpin turns, and bridges. The Nilgiri Mountain Railway spans 29 miles of mountainous terrain in Tamil Nadu state. This steam-driven line climbs through southern jungles, rising towards its terminus at Ooty, Mandalam.

The Kalka-Shimla Railway line climbs close to a mile high, taking passengers through 102 tunnels and across 864 bridges. If the journey is as important as the destination, then the Mountain Railways of India are an essential travel experience. There are intriguing stops along each of these lines, leaving it up to the traveler to decide how long to linger along this iconic route. [Music]

Subtracting multi digit numbers with regrouping

Science Is the Engine That Pulls Humanity Forward

View All

Big Changes at Y Combinator? An Inside Look with S22 Founders

Foreign expecting a full online kind of experience, and instead we got this. You mean the first annual Sonoma badge kickoff? I love just meeting everyone at the start of the batch, surrounded by really smart people from all over the world. Before I was in…

3d curl computation example

So let’s go ahead and work through an actual curl computation. Let’s say our vector-valued function V, which is a function of x, y, and z, this is going to be three-dimensional, is defined by the functions, uh, and I don’t know, let’s say the first compo…

Las Vegas isn't Las Vegas

Vegas, baby! It’s Paradise. Not metaphorically either; this literally isn’t the city of Las Vegas. Look at a map, and you’ll see the name Paradise. And when you visit and check the weather …same thing. Here is Las Vegas, and here is Paradise, which contai…

Introduction to powers of 10

In this video, I’m going to introduce you to a new type of mathematical notation that will seem fancy at first, but hopefully, you’ll appreciate is pretty useful and also pretty straightforward. So let’s just start with some things that we already know. …

Misconceptions About Temperature

When you touch an object and it feels warm or cold, what is that really telling you about the object? Here, I have a metal hard drive and a book, and I’m going to ask people to compare their temperatures. Which one do you think will feel warmer - the boo…

What a Sea Snail Die-off Means for Californians—and the Climate | National Geographic

(slow music) [Narrator] This is a red abalone. It’s basically the oceans’ version of a garden snail. It lives primarily on large rocks in the lush kelp forests of California. It’s also been a popular delicacy in the state for over a century. While wild r…

Take a Ride on One of India's Legendary Mountain Railways | National Geographic

More Articles