Military rule over the Indian Railways

There are many stations named “Cantonment” and “Fort” and even Barrackpore. Here we look at military personnel.

Start at the bottom with “Sepoydhura”, a halt station north of Kurseong on the Darjeeling line. It was closed long ago. Next in the hierarchy is

(Just west of Allahabad on the main line).

Moving up the hierarchy we come to

(North-east of Gorakhpur).

Still further up:

(Near Gonda, yet again in Uttar Pradesh).

Now we are stuck. There is a locality in Kanpur called Generalganj which is fairly close to CNB, but does not have a station. And Senapati district in Manipur, far from any railway.

The term “Chhatrapati” is “protector”, strictly speaking. But that title was given to Shivaji who was a successful military leader.

Maharashtra comes to the rescue with the renamed Bombay VT:

There are numerous smaller places named after war heroes, often from the distant past. And those named after British officials, some of whom were from the military.

One example is from the mid-19th century, commemorating Major Sleeman who led the operations against the Thugs of central India:

This is between Jabalpur and Katni in MP.

A relatively newer one is

which is between Jodhpur and Jaisalmer. It is named after Major Shaitan Singh, Param Vir Chakra awardee from the 1962 war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaitan_Singh

There must be a few others from the post-independence era which I missed out.

Matching station names: India and distant countries

A few examples of stations with the same names in India and distant countries:

Wellington in India, and the capital of New Zealand:

Salem in India and in Oregon, USA. Could not get a suitable picture for Salem in MA.

Riga in Bihar and the capital of Latvia:

Riga is covered in more detail here: https://abn397.wordpress.com/2015/05/05/railfanning-in-riga/

This is not exhaustive but just a few samples. For instance, there is Runneymede station in the Nilgiris which has counterparts in Britain and other Commonwealth countries*.

There are more examples from India and neigboring countries.

• see this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runnymede_(disambiguation)

Quiz on old station names in India-1

Here we have a list of names of railway stations which were being used in timetables between the 1930s and 1970s.

Do you know the current names?

1. Begamabad

2.  Cambay

3.  Cannanore

4.  Chakki Bank

5.  Chicacole Road

6.  Chutiapara

7.  Contai Road

8.  Daman Road

9.  Ellis Bridge

10. Ellora Road

11. French Rocks

12. Futwah

13 Goya Gate

14 Hyderabad (MG)

15 Kankanadi

16 Kirkee

17 Kothapetta

18 Manipur Road

19 Margao

20 Mhow

The best effort is by Bharat Prashar, 18/20.

Answers are given below:

Chutiapara was associated with the Chutia tribe of Assam.

Ellis Bridge is a locality in Ahmedabad near the British-era bridge of that name. There is still a Vidhan Sabha constituency of that name.

Potul is between Manmad and Aurangabad.

Kothapetta became Sirpur Kagaznagar when a paper factory came up there. The station to the south was Sirpur which became Sirpur Town.

Manipur Road was listed as Dimapur Manipur Road in the 1960s before it became Dimapur.

 

The mess at Madras

In the beginning there was Madras Central.

It became Chennai Central in the 1990s.

Someone must have got ideas from this :

and

And now we have:

and

To be really accurate, it should replace MGR by Marudur Gopala Ramachandran. Maybe one could add Menon at the end.

However, official railway sites such as NTSE and IRCTC prefer to call it by something shorter, such as MGR Chennai Central. I doubt if boards on trains use the full form.

Continuing in the same vein, we can look forward to

Kalaignar Dr Muthuvel Karunanidhi Egmore* Railway Station

and

Puratchi Thalaivi Dr Jayalalithaa Jayaram Amma Tambaram Railway Station.

*Eshumbur if one uses the original Tamil name, as you can see from the Hindi sign here:

If this picks up in the rest of the country, there would be further new names such as Atal Behari Vajpayee Gwalior and (God forbid) Pratibha Patil Amravati.

Food on rails

You may have already read about fruit on rails:

https://abn397.wordpress.com/2016/11/30/fruit-on-rails/

Today we explore some more station names associated with food. (This is mainly confined to Hindi and Bengali speaking areas, and there are probably other names which I have missed).

We start with food itself:

Muri (or murmura in Hindi):

which rhymes with

Non-vegetarians would be interested in this:

Other items of interest:

Non-vegetarians would also keep an eye on this:

A station once existed here on the Cutch State Railway:

Cooking utensils are not neglected:

Still more items of interest:

There was probably an Englishman named Currey, but we let that pass.

Some near misses: You should be able to get dhokla here as it is in Gujarat:

(Dholka).

And you might get tuna here as it is near the coast:

And cinnamon (dalchini) here:

When a king ate a lot of rice, this place in Bengal was named

Finally, you can proceed to this place

where you may find drinks sounding similar to

and

Then this place in Bangladesh, not Goa:

We are not done yet. In Pakistan, you will see this place on the way up the Bolan Pass:

I wonder if Bengalis going to Quetta were able to find fish at the station restaurant.

In Bangladesh itself, there used to be a station called Raita near the Hardinge Bridge.

http://www.maplandia.com/bangladesh/khulna-div/kushtia-zl/raita/

From Sri Lanka, we have the closest one for honey:

(Thanks to Vimlesh Chandra for inspiration).

Fruits are left out here, but they are covered in the earlier post referenced at the start.

The goonda stations of Indian railways

This one is better known:

It was in Bihar and is now in Jharkhand. It is on the way from Chandil to Muri. A number of express trains  pass this way, but only two pairs of passenger trains stop here-one between Tatanagar and Hatia and another between Tatanagar and Barkakana.

(While most stations in Bihar have Urdu script in their signs, this is not true in Jharkhand)

This one in Karnataka is nominally a junction, but has fallen on bad days. In fact it is no longer listed in the IR databases such as the RBS tables.

You can see the branching of lines in these pictures. This station is on a branch running south from Hosapete (formerly Hospet). At this junction (which must qualify as one of the smallest and most rudimentary stations with the title of junction) short lines ran to Kotturu and Swamihalli. There used to be heavy iron ore traffic on the then metre gauge line from Swamihalli.

In due course these lines were converted to broad gauge. From Kotturu a new BG line was extended to Harihar, near Hubli on the Pune-Bengaluru route. It was then discovered that the slopes on the BG line between Gunda Road and Kotturu were too steep for safe running, so no train runs there. The line from Kotturu to Harihar has one pair of trains a day. Goods trains appear to run from Hosapete to Swamihalli though there seems to be a bypass around Gunda Road. No passenger service runs on this line.

By mid-2019, Gunda Road does not appear in the RBS tables. Instead, there is a new junction station called Vyasa Colony a few km to the north.

Then there are place names such as Ramagundam.

I don’t know about the etymology of the place in Jharkhand, but “Gundam” is a body of water in languages such as Kannada and Telugu. This would not have anything to do with the Japanese animes of the same name. And Karnataka had a CM called Gundu Rao.

Chrome in Chromepet, Power in Powerpet

While travelling by train in the past, one would have often come across stations with strange-sounding names and wondered about the origin of the names. Now the internet has made it easy to answer these questions. To begin with, there is this suburban station between Chennai Beach and Tambaram:

It was listed in earlier maps and timetables as Chromepet. Now what is its connection with chrome?

The answer lies in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromepet#Etymology

The name came from the Chrome Leather Works which used to have a large factory there.

Note the mismatch between the English and Hindi inscriptions.

Also in Chennai is this station with this antique signboard:

As you would guess, the place gets its name from the humble dhobi:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washermanpet#History

Also note the misspelling of the Hindi inscription.

And this is its counterpart on the Singapore metro:

The signboard reflects the run-down condition of Washermanpet and Royapuram, the latter being the oldest functioning station building on IR. It was the main terminus at Madras when trains started running in 1856. This signboard reflects the condition of the station which has somehow escaped demolition till now:

Finally, we visit this station next to Eluru in Andhra Pradesh:

Does it perhaps have something to do with the Marathas such as Sharad Pawar? Some of them spell their name as Powar*

However, Wikipedia has this to say:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerpet

in which the name is said to be in honour of Sir Power, a railway engineer. I could not find anything else about him. But it is wrong usage, as the correct form is Sir Ravindra Jadeja and not Sir Jadeja.

*The Powar clan, however does seem to be connected to this station near Itarsi in Madhya Pradesh:

When stations change names frequently

Railway stations in India can be renamed for various reasons. The most common reason is to align the English spelling with the local pronunciation-as the British often modified the spellings to suit their convenience. Thus there were mass renamings in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka over the past few decades. Perhaps this was not so much of an issue in Northern and Eastern India. And there have been many name changes in Pakistan and (to a lesser extent) in Bangladesh, but those are different stories.

Then there are name changes in honour of famous people (examples like CST Mumbai, CSMT Kolhapur, Bapudham Motihari and Vanchi Maniyachi).

In fact, the stories beyond renaming of railway stations could well be a topic of a doctoral dissertation or at least a middle-sized book. Maybe I will do that one day. Today, we take up the cases of some stations which have been renamed twice-sometimes twice within a decade.

We start with cases where pictures are readily available:

1):

The average resident of this city would probably stick to calling the station “Majestic”, in the same way his counterparts in other cities stick to Nampalli and Kalupur.

Then we have the case of Mangalore/Mangaluru. While the stations here came under Karnataka’s mass renaming in 2014 onwards, they had already been renamed in the mid-2000s for greater clarity.

The old terminus of Mangalore became Mangalore Central. Then there was a smaller station on the outskirts called Kankanadi, which was the locality’s name. But many long-distance trains stopped only there and not at the old terminus-hence it became important enough to be renamed  Mangalore Jn. We see the story here:

2)

Pictures of Mangalore (as it was) do not seem to be on the net.

3)

But there are several other examples across the country

Olavakkot Jn->Palghat Jn->Palakkad Jn

Here Olavakkot was a small place in the vicinity of the city then known as Palghat. At some time in the 70s it was felt that an important junction (as well as a division HQ) should be renamed to mark the larger city, hence it became Palghat Jn. Large-scale renaming in Kerala (to match the local names in Malayalam) was done in around 1990, though most of the stations were renamed only in the 2007 timetable. It then became Palakkad Jn. (There is also a smaller Palakkad Town nearby) which went through:

Palghat -> Palghat Town -> Palakkad Town

Other examples in and around India include:

Meean Meer West -> Lahore Cantt West -> Lahore Cantt

Meean Meer East -> Lahore Cantt East -> Moghalpura

Mayavaram Jn -> Mayuram Jn -> Mayiladuturai Jn

Bellasis Road -> Bombay Central (Local) -> Mumbai Central (Local)

Manipur Road -> Dimapur Manipur Road -> Dimapur

Marwar Jn is said to have had several name changes in the 19th century.

“Cyclic” name changes:

Dhone Jn -> Dronachellam Jn -> Dhone Jn

Kallakudi Palanganatham -> Dalmiapuram -> Kallakudi Palanganatham

Ashapura Gomat -> Pokhran Road -> Ashapura Gomat

And if you include stations with a single name change, the list will run into hundreds.

Tail piece: Here I am largely considering changes from the 1930s to the present day (except for Lahore where we are starting with the 1860s). In the 19th century there were many rather awkward spellings made by the Brits who built the lines, with names like Ullygurh (obvious) and Unclesar (not so obvious). Ghat Cooper for Ghatkopar lives on in the station code GC, as does Coorla in CLA.

Other double changes starting from the 19th century would include

Arconum -> Arkonam -> Arakkonam

Then there were particularly odd ones I have seen in 19th-century documents, such as Sickle for Sikkal and Cynthia for Sainthia. Quite possibly someone had been thinking of his wife or girlfriend in the latter case.

The changes in names of stations in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka (but not India) can be seen here:

http://www.railwaystationlists.co.uk/