Ticket to Ride Read online

  'Two hundred is very bad,' Mr Lin says. 'Three hundred is severe pollution. We check the index every day. Every half day they change it.'

  Flights had been delayed at Shanghai airport the previous day because of the thick fog caused by pollution, he says, while many highways had also been closed.

  Mr Lin has never been abroad – only five per cent of Chinese citizens have passports – though he has an interest in the wider world. He says that those who want to can easily get around the official ban on certain websites: 'Facebook, there's an app to get you on to that, my friend. Twitter, it's the same. The authorities know that people use Twitter. They are not very strict. What they do not want is anything political.'

  He pauses, then whispers, 'Politics is very sensitive, my friend.'

  Railways came late to China – many years after they were built in India and Japan – as the Qing dynasty was sceptical of the newfangled devices for getting about. There was a belief that steam trains were inventive but impractical, and would interfere with feng shui. British merchants built the first line in Shanghai in the 1860s, but the Qing court considered the tracks 'strange' and had them dismantled. However, the benefits of railways were soon recognised, with privately owned local lines opening around the country, including a link between Nanjing and Shanghai in 1908 (using standard gauge). After the 1911 uprising, Dr Sun Yat-sen oversaw the creation of a national railway network for the new republic. Disruption during the Second World War and the foundation of the People's Republic of China set back the laying of lines. Then came Five-Year Plans and the Great Leap Forward in 1958, designed to bolster the economy, with trains a big part of the plot.

  But it is post 2007, when the first high-speed trains were introduced, that the story has taken off. Since then, the total track length in the country has increased from 48,729 miles to 64,465 miles (at the time of the Qing dynasty's collapse there were 3,128 miles). It is estimated that more than 2.5 million passengers now travel on China's fast trains each day.

  Many of them travel through Shanghai, one of the world's largest cities, with a population of more than 24 million, and home to China's most important stock exchange as well as the busiest port on the planet. It is a very big place and I am here for a day, during which I visit a silk factory, go for an afternoon stroll amid the haze and the skyscrapers on the Bund (where I meet several 'Hello, sir, you like lady' touts) and enjoy an evening at a jazz bar with septuagenarian musicians at my delightful old hotel. I'm at the Peace Hotel, where Bill Clinton, Steven Spielberg and J. G. Ballard have stayed; their pictures are in the lobby.

  In the morning I take a taxi to catch the super-speedy, supersmooth Maglev (Magnetic Levitation) train to Shanghai Pudong airport. This lays claim to being the world's fastest train and it covers 19 miles with a top speed of 431 kmph (269 mph). It's a silver bullet train with orange and blue stripes, and with station notices warning that striding over caution line is forbidden (just in case you were thinking of striding in front of the world's fastest train). Platforms are guarded by shivering police in blue peaked caps; it's a nippy day on my visit, and quite a few passengers are eating sausage McMuffins from the station's McDonald's.

  The train has SHANGHAI TRANSRAPID written on its aerodynamic nose. Inside, the seats in 'economic class' are royal blue and we are soon zooming along. The train has been going for over a decade (it was introduced in 2004) but the Chinese still appear to be getting used to it. Once the McMuffins are consumed, cameras come out and selfies are taken as the digital monitor clicks upwards to 431 kmph. I try to get a decent shot out of the window but all my camera seems to pick up is a blur of trees and electricity pylons, although I do get one in-focus snap: of a B&Q home-improvement store next to some apartment blocks.

  The journey takes a dizzying seven minutes each way, which is just as well as I'm in a rush to catch the train from Shanghai to Beijing. Afterwards, I take a taxi to the intercity station (the ride taking a fair bit longer than seven minutes, over a distance of about a mile) and I arrive at my bullet train to the Chinese capital.

  So begins my final Chinese bullet-train ride. On board, I proceed to drink a Snow beer and eat another VIP Executive Ready Meal. It's a five-hour journey, principally marked by watching a group of drunk American guys get even drunker in the dining carriage as we get closer to our destination. They're singing songs at the start and singing them louder by the end. The attendants in the dining carriage, which they have totally taken over apart from one table of mah-jong players, seem terrified. All sorts of bottles that are not for sale on board litter the carriage. The group seems as though it consists of Ivy League types, perhaps working for multinational corporations; lads on a weekend tour. I have no desire to get to know them as I'm not feeling up to the banter, but one of them grabs me by the shoulders as if I'm a long-lost buddy. I'm holding a couple of Snow beers to take to my seat. Maybe he thinks I'm one of his tribe.

  'From the window, man,' he says. 'From that window I observe everything.' He's pointing outside into the dusky evening murk. 'I can absorb information continually, man. I'm like a video machine taking it all in. Do you see it, man? The horizons are changing, the colours, the patterns, the clouds, the smog and all those buildings being built.'

  Funnily enough, it's not a bad summary of the Chinese bullet-train experience.

  At Beijing's Railway Museum on my final day in China, I find out more about the history of Chinese trains, taking in displays on the latest locomotives and seeing one of the country's oldest remaining locos, The Rocket of China (1881).

  Train museums, as Charlie said back in Kosovo, are important – if you're a rail enthusiast. And the one in Beijing is a corker, found in Beijing's first railway station, dating from 1906, on the south-east corner of Tiananmen Square. Beyond its stripy facade, information panels explain how railways 'went to worse from bad' during the Qing dynasty, and tell me that the top speed of The Rocket of China was just 32 kmph – quite a lot slower than Robert Stephenson's Rocket of 50 years earlier (if I'm reading the information correctly).

  Cabinets are crammed with 'main valves of air compressor on steam locomotive', 'number 15 automatic couplers', hydraulic lifting machines, railway signs adorned with busts of Chairman Mao and old station clocks. Upstairs there are models of the latest G-class bullet trains, a virtual-reality machine that allows you to take a high-speed 'ride', and videos praising the new fast-train line into Tibet – which, like the railway to Hong Kong, takes on a political dimension, though that is not mentioned overtly, of course.

  On the top floor you do get a little bit of politics. A display proclaims that: 'Since China began opening up to the outside world in particular, the Chinese railway industry made unprecedented historic advance on the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics, which not only plays an extremely important role in promoting the development of economic society, but also left a mark on the world history of development of railway.'

  I cannot, however, find a section on the dreadful high-speed train crash of 2011 in Zhejiang province, during which one train was struck by lightning and lost power only for another to speed through malfunctioning signals and collide with it. The result was at least 40 deaths, many serious injuries and the sacking of the then railways minister; safety has since been made a priority, with trains now travelling slower than the fastest possible speeds of 350 kmph.

  Nor can I find any information on Japan's pioneering work on high-speed railways that led to the introduction of Shinkansen bullet trains to coincide with its staging of the 1964 Olympics – half a century or so ahead of China. But there is plenty to keep a rail enthusiast going… including a shop selling model trains, naturally.

  Outside, I take a stroll around Tianamen Square. It has, I reflect, been an unusual, very fast few days in China. From Beijing (with its train-loving conman) to Xi'an and its growing forest of station-side skyscrapers, via the history of the 'rail revolution' in Wuhan, the 'rail revolutionary's' tomb in Nanjing, and the world's quickest train
in Shanghai, I have breathed in the new China from its new high-speed tracks, and I have got a feeling for the pace of the country's rapid 'progress', its manifold difficulties and its ongoing bout of train mania. There's a frenzied atmosphere with the construction of lines going ahead full throttle, and with trains seemingly regarded as a magical way forward that somehow pull together and modernise the vast nation – even attracting a Chinese trainspotter or two (if only I knew what on earth they were saying).

  On this last day, I go to see the pandas and the Great Wall – well, you've got to, really. Now I'm off to another big country, where there were no Qing rulers mistrustful of funny-looking locomotives – and trains arrived a little earlier.

  4

  INDIA: TAKING THE TOY TRAIN

  RAILWAYS MEAN A lot to India – and a few statistics, plus a dash of train history, help explain why.

  To start, there's the sheer scale of them. More than 1.3 million people are employed by Indian Railways, carrying an estimated 20 million passengers and 1.3 million tonnes of freight a day along 68,000 miles of lines (quite a distance further than in China, despite its recent construction boom). To cope with this enormous load, there are approximately 14,500 daily train services. These call in at around 7,000 stations.

  The creation of this giant web of trains has been the work of many years – not without mishaps along the way. The first track in India was laid in 1853 between Mumbai (then Bombay) and Thane, a small town in the countryside. This was a distance of just 21 miles and it was the brainchild of Lord Dalhousie, India's fierce governor-general from 1848 to 1856. He did not hide the fact that he saw railways as a means of reinforcing control of the country during the British Raj. The lines would also open up avenues of commerce, allowing resources such as cotton and coal to reach ports for transportation back to Britain. In turn, the sale of export goods manufactured back home would bolster the profits of the British East India Company.

  Hundreds of thousands of coolies (cheap unskilled workers) were employed on low wages to construct these early tracks. Many suffered terrible deaths, particularly on an infamous section through the Western Ghats mountain range, an initial obstacle on the way out of Mumbai, which was considered on completion to be one of the engineering feats of its time. Lord Dalhousie, who liked to blow his own trumpet, had grand plans: 'The complete permeation of these climes of the sun by a magnificent system of railway communication would present a series of public movements vastly surpassing in real grandeur the aqueducts of Rome, the pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, the temples, palaces and mausoleums of the great Moghul monuments.'

  So the railways came and within 20 years there were more than 5,000 miles of lines. Their military purpose was quickly put to effect during the quashing of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, while the coolies working on the railways themselves revolted against their bosses in 1859 – in protest over late payment of meagre wages. They too were put down, though conditions were subsequently – slightly – improved, and by 1901 there were 24,750 miles of train tracks.

  This rapid growth revolutionised travel in the country and proved hugely popular, even if nationalists such as Mahatma Gandhi later regarded railways as a symbol of imperialism. After Indian independence in 1947, rail construction continued as the population boomed from around 360 million then to more than 1.2 billion now (India is expected to overtake China as the most populous nation soon). Images of passengers hanging on to carriage roofs hitching free rides and crazily cramped commuter trains were to follow, as were backpackers in the mid to late twentieth century, many taking to the Hippie Trail to seek spiritual enlightenment from the country's (occasionally infamous) gurus.

  To get a feel of just how big trains are in India, the current number of Indian Railways employees is more than that of the populations of Mauritius or Cyprus (however daunting it may be to imagine a large-ish island entirely populated by conductors, engineers, train drivers and various other train folk). As an employer, the organisation is now said to rank eighth in the world. The top four spots are held by the US Department of Defence (3.2 million), the People's Liberation Army of China (2.3 million), Walmart (2.1 million) and McDonald's (1.9 million). Guns, guns, groceries, burgers – and a little further down the list, trains.

  Oh yes, and there is something else about trains in India – something that every keen rail enthusiast knows (or ought to).

  They do not run on standard gauge tracks. The track gauge across most of India is 5 feet 6 inches. This covers 75 per cent of Indian railways and is regarded as a 'broad gauge'. It was the brainchild of Lord Dalhousie, who feared that tropical storms could be a threat to trains on standard gauge. He had initially wanted an even broader gauge of 6 metres, though engineers said this would be too wide.

  As well as broad gauge, there are some sections of track that run on 'meter gauge' (1 metre wide), and others, especially in the mountains, where narrow gauge is used. There are two types of this narrow gauge: 2 feet and 6 inches or exactly 2 feet.

  Intriguing, as I'm sure you'll agree (some might even venture to say: exciting). Railways in India open up a whole new train game.

  The Dalai Lama's cardiologist

  New Delhi to Kalka

  With these thoughts in mind, not so long after my Chinese jaunt, I find myself at New Delhi station. It is 7 a.m. and there are a lot of people about. I have walked the last few hundred metres to the station as the traffic jam was so bad the taxi driver thought this option would be better. Out of the cacophony of horns from lorries and autorickshaws – many of which have BLOW HORN written on them, a feat they are achieving with aplomb – I enter the forecourt of my first Indian station.

  It's already baking; the temperature the previous day had touched 40°C, prompting some Delhiites to open fire hydrants to cool off in impromptu showers of water. Porters in red shirts cluster near a taxi rank, a few eyeballing me with hopeful expressions. Skinny men in colourful polo shirts are gossiping by a higgledy-piggledy sea of yellow-topped autorickshaws; drivers waiting for fares. Railway Protection Force Officers in khaki uniforms and berets stand guard.

  I stop to look at an information panel in English that says the station dates from 1926. It was created by the East India Railway Company to help cope with growing demand for train travel, to provide a more relaxed place to board trains than the already busy Old Delhi station. When New Delhi was inaugurated on 13 February 1931, Viceroy Lord Irwin and various bigwigs came through the station to see the newly completed imperial capital – work on which had begun in 1911, overseen by the British architects Sir Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker.

  Above the panel is the front of an old steam locomotive decorated with golden dragons; its name is Deshbandhu ('friend of the nation'), which refers to Deshbandu Chittranjan Das, a much-loved freedom fighter from the period of British rule.

  Those with an interest will perhaps like to note that this locomotive is an Indian Railways WG class that was built in 1950 with a 2-8-2 wheel configuration for broad-gauge tracks. I hesitate before adding that 2-8-2 means the loco had pairs of unpowered wheels at both the front and back of the locomotive, as well as four pairs of wheels powered by the steam engine above – and coupled, or tied, together – in the middle. At least, I think that's right.

  I'm really going to have to watch myself (in case I get into this train stuff just a little too much).

  Beyond the ticket office, chaos reigns. Porters scramble. Passengers throng towards platforms. I follow a crowd and find myself at platform two. My train is long and sky-blue with dented panels partially covered in splattered flies. I'm on the 07:40 to Kalka, a journey that will take about four hours travelling due north through the state of Haryana, covering 190 miles. From Kalka I am to catch a famous narrow-gauge train onwards into the foothills of the Himalayas, ending at Shimla, the summer capital of British India and current capital of the state of Himachal Pradesh. This will take more than five hours over a mere 60 miles, with an arrival time of 17:20. It's said to be one of t
he most spectacular rides in India – some say, the entire world.

  Litter is strewn across the platform, mainly heaps of fastfood packages as well as an occasional pile of papers, as though someone's suitcase has exploded. Porter prices are listed on a wall. Hauling a 40 kg bag would cost 60 rupees (about 60p), while 'carriage of sick person on a stretcher' is 120 rupees (£1.20). I step past a dog sleeping in a patch of sunlight, oblivious to the hurlyburly all around. Further along, a man is also fast asleep, with passengers carefully avoiding his head and outstretched arms, but otherwise paying no attention to him whatsoever.

  And so I board the express train to Kalka. As I am to take only three trains in India – the two up to Shimla and an overnight sleeper back – I've decided to do it in comfort. A first-class ticket, bought in advance, to Kalka in an air-conditioned carriage is £12.55 – hardly a maharajah's ransom. I settle into a turquoise seat with a red-yellow-and-lilac swirly 1980s-style pattern. The windows have aquamarine shades that have been pulled down a third of the way, allowing a view but blocking the sunshine. The air conditioning is strong. People have plugged electronic devices into sockets halfway up the carriage walls, making it look as though we are in a high-tech mobile unit of some kind (although cartoons and soaps flash up on screens).