The little blue train 6

Darjeeling - New Jalpaiguri - Kolkata

We left Darjeeling early as it was election day in West Bengal and to avoid being delayed by road blocks. The journey was this time in a Tata 4WD that had no seatbelts!

The weather was ever changing during our decent. It went from sunshine to rain to fog to rain to sunshine. The driver decided to avoid the normal road and instead go through tea plantations. I must say it was scenic.

A scene of a landslide in the distance

New Jalpaiguri is a busy railway station where tracks from Assam in the north to Kolkata in the south and lines to the west and the narrow gauge Darjeeling Himalayan Railway converge at this station. This station use to have 3 different gauge tracks. The narrow 2 ft gauge of the DHR, the metre gauge to Assam and the broad gauge of the Indian Railway system. The metre gauge has now been converted to the broad gauge.

The layout of New Jalpaiguri

A very colourful steam locomotive at the carpark of the station

  This is a really busy station with more than a hundred express train passing through the station daily to destinations all over India. There are also express trains that originate from this station. As photography is a sensitive security issue, I approached the station master for permission and he was kind enough to walk with me so that security would me alone while we had a nice chat about trains.

On the left is the narrow gauge DHR tracks and the right the broad gauge tracks

Indian Railways DMU

These DMU's operate short and medium distance services

WDG4 diesel electric loco normally used for cargo services

A class WDG-3A loco. "W" -wide gauge, "D" - diesel, "G" -  used only for Goods trains, "3A" - means the locomotive's power is 3,100 hp ('3' stands for 3000 hp, 'A' denotes 100 hp more)

The class WDP-4 on the left is capable of hauling 24 coach trains at 110–120 km/hour. It has also been used for speed trials where it has hauled 8 coach trains at 160 km/hour.

The yard is full of cargo trains

The platforms are constantly busy with express trains arriving every few minutes

Our train to Kolkata, the Padatik Express departs at night and we had about 6 hours to kill at the station, so we hired a "retirement room". While the room was in bad condition, it was at least an oasis from the chaos below.

About an hour before departure we had to go to check the passenger list to find out our berth assignment. When you book a ticket in India, you are not assigned a seat until about an hour before departure. You have to join the hundreds that will converge at the board where a you would have to find your name from a computer printout.

The Padatik Express is a daily "superfast" train which runs between New Jalpaiguri and Sealdah Station in Kolkata, a distance of 573 kilometres and takes just over 10 hours. This train is named after renowned Bengali poet Subhash Mukhopadhyay's book - Padatik. 

The train offers all the available classes of travel on Indian Railways – 1st AC(1A), 2nd AC(2A), 3rd AC(3A), Sleeper(SL), General Unreserved Class. The train is composed of 16 coaches and is usually hauled by WDM-3A from Bardhaman diesel loco shed.

We booked the 1st Class Aircon which are compartments with 4 sleeping berths except for one compartment that has only 2 berths and were lucky to be assigned 2 berth compartment.

A WDM-3A class loco 16414 on duty that night. Class WDM-3A is IR workhorse diesel locomotive since 1994, manufactured in India by the Diesel Locomotive Works (DLW), Varanasi.

16 Coaches long

Our coach

The corridor of our 1st class coach

Our 2 berth 1st class cabin

2nd class Aircon

The very sad vegetarian meal on board the train

  I had a very good nights sleep as I was so tired from all the traveling. Woke up to realise that we were about 1 hour delayed, so spent the time looking at the countryside and the many trains we crossed.

Thank you for visiting Rail Plane Travels. Next part is about Kolkata. Drop by again for that.