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]

Khan Kickoff Overview

Comparative advantage worked example | Basic economics concepts | AP Macroeconomics | Khan Academy

View All

Holland vs the Netherlands

Welcome to the Great nation of Holland: where the tulips grow, the windmills turn, the breakfast is chocolatey, the people industrious, and the sea tries to drown it all. Except, this country isn’t Holland. It’s time for: The Difference Between Holland, t…

Worked example: finding relative extrema | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

So we have G of X being equal to X to the fourth minus X to the fifth. What we want to do, without having to graph G, is figure out what X values G has a relative maximum. Just to remind us what’s going on in a relative maximum, let me draw a hypothetica…

Congress is about to make a huge mistake for astronomy #SaveChandra

Congress is about to make a huge mistake in space. In the 1990s, NASA launched four telescopes called the Great Observatories. Their purpose was to study the universe across the electromagnetic spectrum. As the telescopes aged, NASA built replacements for…

Lensa makes $1M/Day (& Steals Your Face)

By this point, there’s no doubt about it: artificial intelligence is taking over the mainstream, and people who know how to leverage this technology are getting insanely rich. Applications like Lensa AI and Don AI are literally flipping mobile apps like I…

Why Lionfish Should Be Your Favorite Fish to Eat | Nat Geo Live

When I was 17, I was diving off the coast of South Florida and I saw the most beautiful fish I had ever seen. It had these bold stripes and these big dramatic spines. And I had no idea what it was. So I went to the dive master and he told me I had just se…

WE JUST HIT 100K SUBSCRIBERS! Free Lifetime Mentoring Giveaway + Q&A!

[Music] Area [Music] You’re getting my real reaction here. Like, this is… we hit 10,000, you guys! Oh, that’s crazy! I am blown away, you guys. Like, I was just in traffic right now, as you could see, I’m just in traffic, and I refreshed the YouTube thing…

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

More Articles