Railway journey: 200 exciting years of passenger trains

“Whenever I see a train passing by from a close distance, I feel very energised; I can feel the vibrations of that huge machine in my body,” said one of my closest friends, on a nice and cosy evening.

We went to the “Tinkona Pukur” (triangular shaped large pond) area to sit in the breeze and chat after playing cricket in the afternoon. That area was our very own "tourist spot".

There was (and still is) a huge beel (vast natural waterbody) just by the Tinkona Pukur; there were two different railway tracks at two sides of the pond.

One of the tracks was called “pilot line” as only a commuter train between Ishwardi and Pakshi used to carry passengers through that track several times a day. At that time, headquarters of Western Zone Railway, one of two zones of Bangladesh Railway, were at scenic Pakshi.

A number of officials and employees used to live in Ishwardi and commuted to their office and home using the “pilot train”.

The other set of railway tracks were for the long-distance trains. Those tracks were set up on the land which was a few feet elevated from the surrounding area, thus creating a nice slope for sitting by the tracks at a safe distance and chatting and passing the time amid light and wind, and the vibrations of trains sometimes.

The area was just over a kilometer away from our homes. So we used to go there to hang out regularly and feel the vibrations of the train. At that time I was not familiar with the term “ trainspotting”, a very British habit of watching trains passing by from a very close distance.

My friend Raju and I didn't realise we were born trainspotters. In fact the evening we came to know that we share this hobby, we thought it to be a bit peculiar at that time, and a friendship started growing.

We regularly would go trainspotting. Sometimes we would go to the station and walk around the railway junction. By then we knew Ishwardi is one of the largest railway junctions of Bangladesh. There were many freight trains, abandoned for a long time on the railway tracks bordering the junction, and there were the ones in use. Those used to be shunted, arranged and rearranged, according to their purposes. Sometimes we even boarded slowly running railway engines, locomotives, used for shunting the passenger coaches and freight cars.

We had no idea that a railway station or the junction could be part of the identity of a place, as well as a point of departure from it. We were, unknowingly to a great extent, shaped by that huge running machine that produces vibrations and the station and the junction.

The train is sometimes called the safest mode of transportation, to some it’s the most comfortable, but to us, it was basically a wonder. Of course we were not two Apus from Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s novel, Pather Panchali, which was later transformed into a one of greatest films around the world by larger than life filmmaker Satyajit Ray in 1955.

We all know, Apu asked “naïve” questions like “how do the trains run on two iron bars?” and “why don’t they fall running on just two bars?” Instead, we were amazed by the vibrations a train produces while moving swiftly on two parallelly placed heavy iron rails , set up on pebbles and slippers.

Or, maybe somebody else, who earns a lot through setting up stations and railway tracks in areas without proper feasibility study, will tell us the same: naïve people and their naïve thoughts and feelings.

However, this writing is not about any corruption scandals or their dubious deals. Rather, this is about what I, or for that matter many others, felt during childhood watching trains passing by from a close distance. The first watchers surely were no different from us.

This 27 September 2025 marks the 200th year of the first ever rail vehicle to transport passengers. Let’s recall the incident when Robert Stephenson and Co’s Locomotion No. 1 arrived in Stockton, Durham, England crossing 42 kms from Shildon on 27 September 1825, and  met by a seven-gun salute and a crowd bowled over by the spectacle - a giant machine moving over just two sturdy iron bars!

“It was found to be quite impossible to restrain the enthusiasm of the multitude,” reported a mildly concerned Durham County Observer journalist, quoted by an editorial of The Guardian on 26 September.

The enthusiasm of the multitude remains the same. It would have been wonderful had our authorities shared the same kind of enthusiasm, not the other, like corruption and the act of looting what belongs to others, which the colonialists once did using trains.