Indian Railways Works Manual (2000) [pdf]
iricen.gov.in
iricen.gov.in
Doing a cursory glance at a Wikipedia entry, some of the stats:
1. Established in 1832
2. 3rd largest railway network in the world
3. 8th largest employer in the world.
I was hoping to see something about the actual Rail Track details but this is more of a civil engineering specs for building construction.
I am curious about when and how Indian Railways will incorporate high speed rail such as the French TGV, Japanese Shinkansen or Chinese CRH.
On a visit to China in 2017 and taking a short trip in the Chinese CRH, I heard stats about 2,000 high speed trains a day. It was an interesting experience traveling at speeds greater than 300 kmh and not feeling a thing.
Of course I am curious about when the USA will incorporate the same.
Indian Railways is a state owned enterprise - a very large one. Until recently, India's central government released two annual financial statements (budgets) each year: one for railways, and the second for everything else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai%E2%80%93Ahmedabad_high-...
So there are two parallel efforts going on.
High speed bullet trains[1]. These require building everything from scratch, tracks, stations and so on. When fully operational, it will be a truly new experience for Indians and hope will boost economy and benefit common man.
The second one[2] is upgrading existing tracks and coaches to be run at a higher speed (I guess around ~150KM/h). This will also have an added benefit of upgrading existing infrastructure such as signalling, crossings, tracks etc., Given the sheer size and complexity of Indian Railways IMO this will have more benefits as it'll improve the overall running times, utilisation and such.
Indian Railways is a life line of millions of people as they rely on it for daily wages. And as far as complex systems to very few come close to it. Until very recently they still relied on manual token exchange mechanism[3]. During one of train station visits my father drew my attention to token exchange and explained how it worked. Truly awesome.
I'm glad to see it on the front page of HN; more people need to know about it.
[1] https://www.nhsrcl.in/en/home
[2] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/102-vande-...
[3] https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Thiruvananthapuram/Ball...
But why would you have to build new _stations_ for them?
1. have to switch out the driver position from one end of the train to another end to just leave the station again and
2. have a series of track switches which may malfunction (which ironically is a challenge even for highly industrialised countries like Germany), and it
3. means more and slower track to be maintained.
If you set up a bullet train program, you want speed, and these problems kill the speed advantage. The solution is to build a new station in which the train can just pass through.
You forgot the German ICE[1] ;-)
India is in the shape of a diamond, where the most populous cities would be at the four points of the diamond aligned North-South. A high speed train network that would cover Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai together as a fully connected graph will probably have the highest volume of traffic. [1]
A trip from Trivandrum, Kerala or Kanya Kumari, Tamil Nadu in the South of India to the stations in Assam or Arunachal Pradesh in the North East of India would be some of the longest trips that you can take.
India has also some of the most beautiful railway lines in the world with switchbacks connecting the plains to the hill stations. [2]
Also some of the most expensive train rides. [3]
Of course there's air travel for the time conscious but the trains are for the adventurous travelers.
BTW, One of the most interesting stays I had in the US was at the Chattanooga Choo Choo in Chattanooga, TN. [4]
[1] https://www.trainspnrstatus.com/images/indianrailwaymap.jpg
[2] https://navrangindia.blogspot.com/2017/09/amazing-darjeeling...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_l...
Besides that, I doubt, that they all are independent products, but rather one of the named platforms.
The British era recommendations hadn't been removed by 1967 at least.
Same in India. I was referring to the other perks that the GP post mentioned. I cannot find the reference to 'only first class passengers get toilets' in the document. In fact the phrase 'first class' itself has zero hits, there's one hit for 'upper class' which is unrelated. Perhaps they meant toilets adjacent to waiting rooms for first class at the station so they don't have to walk to the general ones.
The European class system is essentially what transformed into the Indian caste system.
Not to mean there was no social hierarchy in India, but the rigid birth based system we have today is the handiwork of the British social engineering.
Especially interesting is the population survey which labeled population with a caste, the power to label someone X lay with the enumerator rather than the person being enumerated self identifying with a caste.
That is not true. Caste endogamy goes back a long ways[1] before the Brits.
1. https://www.brownpundits.com/2018/06/07/genetical-observatio...
This is a better and more holistic description. I'd quibble withs some aspects of its framing but it's mostly nitpicks. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3514343/
The gist of it is that there are a lot of discrete, endogamous subgroups within India formed by successive waves of migration by different groups to where they are functionally distinct ethnic populations. So it wouldn't be all that different from racial differences in a plural society like the United States. What's remarkable is the maintenance of this plurality, as well as in-group social norms, over a very long span of time rather than it becoming a genetic melting pot as we might have expected from experiences with Europe. But even there you still have distinct groups with strong endogamy norms (e.g. Ashkenazi Jews).
There's also additional complexity because in many places there isn't just a norm of endogamy, but consanguinity (cousin-marriage). Which is certainly going to make groups look more endogamous even though it would lead us to draw subtly different conclusions about what that means in terms of historic cultural norms.
TL;DR it's a really complicated matter that doesn't lend itself to summarization into a single, clean, generalizable narrative.
Excerpt:
The British Raj furthered this development, making rigid caste organisation a central mechanism of administration. Between 1860 and 1920, the British formulated the caste system into their system of governance, granting administrative jobs and senior appointments only to Christians and people belonging to certain castes.
[1] https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Sociology/Intro...
To justify the "pre-date", proponents combine highly distorted theory of jatti and varna to artificially synthesize Indian caste system.
The connection of caste with Europe is much more solid and meaningful given the monopoly of church over God and the king as the representative of God.
[1] https://indianexpress.com/article/india/kerala-dalit-priests...
I mean I still avoid using the toilets, but it is nowhere near as bad as it used to be.
It maybe went from worse to bad. I'll give you that but it is nowhere near normal.
Page 116:
> All toilets should be gradually converted into Pay & Use system.
Which is to say that the quality of service is the result of political decisions at the social level rather than the fares. The fares could well have been 0 with great service, or much higher with the same poor quality.
1. To Return multiple times returns for British investors on the expense of Indian colonies. 2. To move supply of Raw material to the ports and manufactured goods from England to the natives.
The British left India. But the Indian Railways is still in India.
This organization was not built to serve the people of the land. The Indians have improved it, despite being ruled by socialist governments for 70 years after independence.
Pakistan would like a word.
Maurya Empire-284 BCE [1:57]
Delhi Sultanate (Tughlaq)-1345 [8:45]
Mughal Empire-1692 [10:24]
As for 'they also brought manufactured goods back', they exported raw materials from India and imported back finished goods, thereby destroying the local industries in India.
>By the mid-19th century, the Indian economy had been fully transformed into a colonial trade pattern, where its export consisted mainly of agricultural commodities such as foodgrains, and the home charges were met by exporting such commodities, while the imports consisted of manufactured goods, especially cotton textiles and machinery (Siddiqui, 2015c). After the 1880s, the trade imports became more diversified, due to the growing penetration of foreign manufactured goods such as cotton textiles, capital goods, machinery etc. (Siddiqui, 1996) This in turn further undermined the position of the local producers and hastened the decay of indigenous industries and handicrafts.
https://worldfinancialreview.com/the-political-economy-of-fa...
Dr Shashi Tharoor did a nice speech about the British rule in India listing out the damages they did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4. Text version of this speech available here: https://www.news18.com/news/india/read-shashi-tharoors-full-.... His book on the same topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglorious_Empire
Then there is the famines. Famines during british rule is estimated to have killed from 20-50 million Indians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_I.... Google image search of 'british india famines' should show some photos for those who haven't heard of this before. An article talking about why famines occured: https://worldfinancialreview.com/the-political-economy-of-fa...
Seems to be a fairly trite government publication that is more of interest to civil engineers.
I thought maybe there was something in the document that would provoke a few laughs but can't find anything there either.
I am curious though, what part of the title indicated to you that there was something humorous in it?
Surely, I thought to myself, the only reason this would have made it to the HN front page is if there were a few guffaws in it related to how asinine a government document could be, but I couldn't find anything in there that indicated the same.