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]

New Hampshire Summer Learning Series Session 5: Writing Coach

Critiquing Startup Mobile Apps with Glide CEO

View All

Have We Ever All BLINKED At The Same Time?

Has there ever been a moment in our history when no one was watching because every living human just happened to blink at the exact same time? Well, let’s see. Humans blink about once every 4 seconds, and a typical blink is about a third of a second long.…

Sine of time

Now I want to introduce a new idea, and that is the idea of voltage or current, some electrical signal being a function of time: cosine of Omega T. So here what we’re doing is we’re introducing time as the argument to a cosine, and time is that stuff tha…

NERD WARS: John McClane (Die Hard) vs Indiana Jones

Hey Vsauce and wacky gamer fans, it’s Jeff Fragment from Nerd Wars! We’re trying something different this week. We’re going over your comments on John McClane versus Indiana Jones. Don’t forget to comment on the videos, ‘cause we may highlight them in ne…

iPhone 15 and Planned Obsolescence

On September 7th, 2022, Apple announced its latest product releases during its Far Out event. As expected, the iPhone 14 was headlining the new generation of products, sporting a fairly similar look and slightly upgraded specs to its iPhone 13 predecessor…

Cameras Reveal the Secret Lives of a Mountain Lion Family | Short Film Showcase

Mountain lion, puma, cougar— all names for an animal that has long been misunderstood, feared, hunted, and eliminated from most of its range. The cougar is often believed to be solitary and even heartless, but recently, deep in the Wyoming Wind River Rang…

What Would Elon Musk Work On If He Were 22?

You famously said when you were younger there were five problems that you thought were most important for you to work on. If you were 22 today, what would the five problems that you would think about working on be? Well, I think if somebody is doing some…

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

More Articles