The Same Old Track

Mumbai’s suburban rail network is still essentially what the British built

- Prachi Pinglay-Plumber

Lamentation has finally given way to stock-taking. On September 29, 23 people lost their lives in a stampede at Elphinstone Road railway station in Mumbai. Happening in the backdrop of a spate of train accidents across the country, the stampede turned the spotlight on Mumbai’s suburban train network, whose history coincides with that of the Indian Railways. India’s first train from Thane to Bori Bunder in 1853 ran on what would become the Central line of Mumbai’s railway grid. And it was in 1867 that the first train ran on the Western line, from Virar to Back Bay. Much has changed since and yet so little. In 1892, when the first fast local started from Bandra to Back Bay, a station between the present-day Marine Lines and Churchgate, the journey took five minutes less than it does today. This is symbo­lic of how little the suburban network has travelled since it was established.

A network in place by the 1920s had to cater to a sharp spike in population after 1971. Commuters doubled in the next decade.