Hidden stories of the Khyber Railway-4

Concluding the series with an attempt to answer the question “Where did the Khyber Railway end?”

Anyone familiar with this line would know that

The line up to Landi Kotal was opened on 3 Nov 1925,

and was extended up to Landi Khana on 3 Apr 1926

and the section from Landi Kotal to Landi Khana was closed on 15 Feb 1932.

There is no mention in the Annual Reports of IR of that period (up to 1931) about any further line being opened beyond Landi Khana

Now see this map (presumably prepared by Bayley and Hearn) which is part of the papers they read at the Institution of Engineers.

Beyond Landi Kotal there is the reversing station of Tora Tigga, and finally the “terminus” at Landi Khana. This too is a reversing station from where a line appears to proceed to a point on the Afghan border.

However, there does not seem to be any explicit mention of the tracks being laid beyond Landi Khana. In their paper it is mentioned that Landi Khana is a reversing station from where there is a short distance to the border.

Richard Wallace, who has studied this line in detail, says that tunnels were built beyond Landi Khana but rails were not laid.

Probably this brief writeup by Andrew Grantham sums it up:

http://www.andrewgrantham.co.uk/afghanistan/railways/khyber-pass-railway/

In particular: “An alignment was cleared for a extension of the line from Landi Khana to the Afghan border post, although it is uncertain whether any tracks were ever laid on this final section of the route.”

One interesting thing I found was in this map which was part of the 1930 NWR timetable:

This shows “Torra Tigga Nala” beyond Landi Khana. Perhaps this is where the tracks were supposed to end. I have not come across this name anywhere else. It may well be an error connected with Tora Tigga, or the place where the rails were expected to end.

This extract from the 1930 NWR timetable shows the trains running to Landi Khana.

It is a little hard to read the footnotes. But they mention that the trains ran 7 days a week (both ways) up to Landi Kotal and continued beyond to Landi Khana on 2 days. In the last days of the Khyber Railway there was one pair of trains a week to Landi Kotal.

Finally-it may not be too difficult to locate the mythical tracks beyond Landi Khana. See this video from 2017 where the visitors walk down to the station from the highway:

Even the water column still works!

Closing with old pictures of the station, which must be from before 1932:

Hidden stories of the Khyber Railway-1

The Khyber Railway may not see trains again. While its basic history is known well enough, there are a couple of planned extensions which may have changed the history of the route if they had been implemented.

We start with the basics, from this “official” map used by Victor Bayley and Gordon Hearn  in a paper presented at the Institution of Engineers in the late 1920s. It can be found in “Couplings to the Khyber” by PSA Berridge:

Not all of these stations appeared in timetables.

The Khyber Railway actually starts from Jamrud, which was the railhead beyond Peshawar Cantt since 1901. Work on the present line started in the 1920s, and the section up to Landi Kotal was opened in 1925 and up to Landi Khana in 1926. While an embankment may have been built up to the border, probably rails were not laid. These are points which are yet unclear and can be established only by visits to the area-if it is safe enough.

The stations listed in timetables are given in the Fergusson lists:

Note Kacha Garhi, we will meet it again soon. It seems to have been in the timetables only around 1910.

As most readers know, passenger trains did run up to Landi Khana up to 1932. Then the ruler of Afghanistan “requested” that this be stopped, and the trains then ran only up to Landi Kotal.

It is unclear how useful the line was for freight. Typically there was a passenger train from Peshawar Cantt to Landi Kotal on one or two days of the week from the 1940s onward. Regular services stopped in 1984, though tourist specials ran on and off until rainstorms washed away large parts of the line in 2006.

Even so, it is still possible to see see remnants of the line and stations (yes, even Landi Khana) if you travel by the road which now sees plenty of goods traffic into Afghanistan.

Next we come to the lesser-known stories connected with the line’s construction.

To begin with:

The official date of opening from Jamrud to Landi Kotal was 3 Nov 1925. and to Landi Khana 3 Apr 1926. Nothing is said about the line beyond Landi Khana.

But Richard Wallace has found evidence that work on the tunnels was continuing even after these dates. Not so surprising, as it is possible to run trains through tunnels where all work has not been completed as long as there is nothing to block the rails.

To be continued.

The importance of Landi Khana-2

Here are a few other pictures of Landi Khana station when it was open in 1926-32:

Unlike now, there are some fortified compounds near the station as well as local habitation.

We also look at the Pakistan Railways timetable of  November 1972. It was still officially called the Pakistan Western Railway. (There is a reason for this, as Bangladesh (former East Pakistan) was not recognized by “West Pakistan” until 1974).

This also shows the timetables of three of the narrow gauge lines which were all closed by the early 90s.

The line to Landi Kotal now had services only on Sunday, still with the hard-working HGS locos. Sometimes the SGS 0-6-0s were also seen there.

Now we return to the India-Pakistan war of 1971 which resulted in the liberation of Bangladesh. While most of the action took place in what was then called East Pakistan, there were also significant military operations in the west involving the armies, navies and air forces of the two countries.

There were a significant number of POWs captured on both sides. The Indian army officers and other ranks were imprisoned at Lyallpur (now Faisalabad), while the relatively smaller number of 12 IAF officers were sent to a PAF prison at Rawalpindi.

The story of the escape has been covered in several books, such as:

“Death Wasn’t Painful”, by DS Jafa (who was one of the POWs, though not one of the three escapees)

“Four Miles to Freedom”, by Faith Johnston (a journalist who had access to the concerned persons in later years).

and an appendix in “My Years with the IAF” by Air Chief Marshal PC Lal, which is written by another escapee Harish Sinhji.

These are all available from Amazon in and other Amazons.

They are all worth reading, although the second one may be a little better written.

I am not going to recount the full details of the story, which you can read in the books mentioned above. There is also a film “The Great Indian Escape” which is being released in October 2019.

The three who escaped were :

Flight Lieutenant Dilip Parulkar

Flight Lieutenant MS Grewal, and

Flight Lieutenant Harish Sinhji

The actual escape from the prison was not too difficult. The question was how to get back to India. A basic map of the northern half of Pakistan may help:

If you are trying to get from Rawalpindi to India, you have to cross through a long stretch of relatively populated areas and then the well-guarded borders with large defensive positions on both sides. Even in August 1972 (long after the cease-fire) it would be extremely dangerous.

But reaching the Afghan border was simpler. The distance from Rawalpindi to the border crossing at Torkham (beyond Landi Kotal) was considerably less. Then, unlike now, Afghanistan was a relatively peaceful country and it would not have been a major problem to contact the Indian embassy in Kabul or other sources once beyond the border.

So the western route it was. The only problem is that no one was familiar with the exact route to the border. While the IAF had struck as far as Peshawar, no one had a clear idea of how to get to the border from there.

Help came in the form of a variety of books which were sent to them from the stocks of various Pakistani cantonments. One of them was “Murray’s Guide to India” which was probably from the 1920s or the 1930s. This used to be the standard handbook for traveling Brits in India during the Raj, and was packed with exquisite details and maps.

I could not locate the exact edition which the POWs used, but it may have had maps like this one from an earlier edition in 1903:

At that time the railway had ended at Jamrud.

Perhaps a good map would have been like this (an extract from the official Indian Railway map of 1933):

In this map Landi Khana is shown as the terminus, as it was until 1932.

Thus, the escapees reasoned, they should make their way to Peshawar and then to Landi Khana which was only about a mile from the border. They were to pose as PAF officers on holiday.

From Harish’s account:

The escape on the night of 12 August 1972 initially went like clockwork. They left through a tunnel to the adjacent road at about 00.30 on the 13th. In a short while they found a Peshawar-bound bus, which reached its destination by dawn. By 06.00 they had got to Jamrud, and then to the fort which is known as the gateway to the Khyber. A friendly local helped them to get on a bus to Landi Kotal, which was effectively the last town in Pakistan. It was then 09.30, nine hours after leaving the camp.

Continuing with their plan, they enquired about transport to Landi Khana which was about four miles ahead. Many of the locals were puzzled, as no one had any reason to go there. Finally they got an offer for a taxi. By then they had aroused a lot of curiosity.

The local Tehsildar’s clerk  came up and started questioning them. What followed is summarized here in an extract from Jafa’s book:

To cut a long story short, they were taken into custody. They were soon on their way back to the prison at Rawalpindi. If only they had known better than to ask for a long-vanished place……

The IAF officers were then sent to the larger and more secure camp at Lyallpur where the 500-odd Army prisoners were already housed. Ultimately all of them were repatriated in early December 1972 after spending almost a year in captivity.

However, if they had kept quiet and somehow made their way to the lightly-guarded border 4-5 miles away, they should have been able to enter Afghanistan and ultimately return to India. Or maybe not, since the people of Landi Kotal were familiar with stranded Bangladeshis trying to leave Pakistan by the same route.

Perhaps today’s IAF pilots have been briefed better. Wing Commander Abhinandan did not have time to plan an escape, which would have been almost impossible as he was the lone Indian prisoner at the time.

The importance of Landi Khana-1

You would have heard of Landi Kotal, long known as the terminus of the Khyber Railway and the main cantonment guarding the head of the pass.

Landi Khana is not so well known. We first look at a detailed map of the Khyber Railway, which featured in an article by Victor Bayley and Gordon Hearn, the men most responsible for the construction of the line:

This lists all the stations on the line. Most of them were not shown in timetables.

The line was completed up to Landi Kotal in 1925 and to Landi Khana in 1926. Actually the line (or at least the embankment) was built up to a point right on the border. This point is mentioned as Torra Tigga Nala in contemporary accounts, though it is unclear what exactly it was (A station? or siding? or no track at all?)

Trains ran all the way up to Landi Khana in the first few years. Then the King of Afghanistan “requested” the Indian government to close the last stretch of the line. So no trains ran beyond Landi Kotal since 1932.

Here we see the 1930 NWR timetable for the line going all the way to Landi Khana:

My old friends from Dehradun would note the passenger train connecting Peshawar Cantt with that city. Coming to the point, we see from the small print that the trains ran between Landi Khana and Peshawar twice a week, and started from Landi Kotal on the other five days. This was the peak traffic for this line; by the time regular services ceased in 1984 the train ran up to Landi Kotal only once a week.

In the reverse direction, we see the same pattern, except that on Sundays the train left Peshawar later to provide a connection with the Frontier Mail and ran up to Landi Kotal.

Timetables in later years mentioned that “Passports will be examined at Jamrud”, meaning that you needed a passport to travel into the tribal territory where the British government had limited powers. However (as my father recounted), tourists from other parts of India could travel up to Jamrud, probably have their picture taken there, and say that they had visited the Khyber.

This is a picture of Landi Khana station (which obviously was taken between 1926 and 1932):

Note the Gurumukhi script. And the ever-reliable HGS locos which tackled the Khyber and Bolan passes without much fuss.

There appears to have been a small military outpost here, but it must have closed long ago. Which is why many people (even those presently living in Pakistan) do not know of its existence. As we will see, the remnants of this station still stand but there does not seem to be anything around it. The local villagers still use water from the water pipes laid in the 1920s for watering engines.

You may find it interesting to watch this 9-minute video (entirely in Urdu) from 2017 to see this place as a sideline to a trip up to the Afghan border:

Note the Gurumukhi sign which no one has bothered to remove yet.

One of the places they passed was this station which was one of the stops on the excursion trains which ran until the floods wrecked the line in 2008.

Here another sign in Gurumukhi script still survives, unlike this one from pre-partition Lahore:

If you approached the Afghan border, you would see this sign if you tried to cross anywhere except the official route:

And if you did succeed in crossing, you could look back and see this:

It should not be difficult to understand what P, J and LKL were. In those days all distances were measured in miles.

Now, you may say, you have told us all about a corner of Pakistan so obscure that few Pakistanis (leave alone Indians) have heard of it. Why is it important?

The answer is: It was important to know about it if you were an Indian POW in Pakistan in 1972.

To be continued.

The Khyber Pass in the 1930s-photo feature and other rail-related material.

This post is dedicated to a photo album which used to belong to a British soldier named Albert Chalcroft who appears to have been posted in Landi Kotal in the Khyber Pass, (close to the Afghan border) in the late 1930s. As it often happens, the album was discovered by his descendants many years later (maybe c.2010) and was put up on the net.

This album is interesting in that it shows many aspects of life as a British soldier in the Khyber Pass area at that time. There are some pictures of trains on the Khyber Railway as well as a number of crashed light aircraft. Some pictures appear to show the road crossing between India and Afghanistan. However there are hardly any meaningful captions.

Many of these pictures have ended up in the results of Google searches for the Khyber Pass.

https://flic.kr/s/aHsjAkttMW

Explanatory notes:

Landi Kotal was the terminus of the Khyber Railway which was opened in 1925. From 1926 to 1932 it ran a few miles further towards the border up to another station called Landi Khana, though this section was closed in 1932.

A collection of old timetables of the North Western Railway (which covered most of present-day Pakistan and a bit of present-day India) can be seen here:

http://www.irfca.org/gallery/Heritage/timetables/nwrtt/

The line up to Landi Khana can be seen in the folder of the 1930 timetable. Only a few routes are shown here.

The entire NWR timetable as of 1943 can also be seen in another folder, which is from the Indian Bradshaw of that period.

Note the bit about passport checks at Jamrud in the 1943 timetable. As I understood from my father and other older persons who had traveled there, tourists from other parts of India could travel up to Jamrud fort in the 1930s but not beyond without special permission. However, they could claim that they had seen the Khyber Pass.

And the milestone at the border refers to P = Peshawar, J = Jamrud  and LKL = Landi Kotal (the main cantonment at the top of the pass).

The last few pictures show Mr Chalcroft and his wife in later years. He appears to have worked in the Customs and Excise department at Liverpool. The last two pictures appear to be of Mr Chalcroft’s sister.