May be of interest to those who are into the study of the Indian Railways all over the country:
http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=137331
Warning-not all the spellings are correct.
The above link is not working when I rechecked. An alternative is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zones_and_divisions_of_Indian_Railways
as well as:
https://erail.in/blog/zones-and-divisions-of-indian-railways
It is interesting if one wants to see how the newer zones were created. A rather obvious case is the North Western Railway which was formed from Jodhpur and Bikaner divisions of NR and Jaipur and Ajmer divisions of WR, thus creating a zone whose jurisdiction covers most of Rajasthan.
Similarly, the East Central Railway was formed from Danapur, Dhanbad and Mughalsarai divisions of ER and Samastipur and Sonpur divisions of NER, thus covering most of Bihar.
The North Central Railway has a rather mixed parentage. It includes the divisions of Allahabad (ex NR), Jhansi (ex CR) and Agra (a new division with bits and pieces of WR, CR and NR, perhaps even NER).
One particularly odd thing is the Waltair division. Waltair is a suburb of Visakhapatnam where the main railway station is located. Waltair was renamed to Visakhapatnam over two decades ago but the division name remains.
But there are counter-examples of this. On SR there used to be the Olavakkot division which became the Palghat division and finally the Palakkad division, in line with the changes of the name of the station.
There are plenty of other points of interest in this listing, particularly for those into the history of IR.
Important note: The proposed South Coast zone and its divisions are very unclear at the time of writing.
abn397 