humongous steam engine is ready to run at the cantonment station on Delhi on October 26 which means an era of bullet trains would witness a return of vintage classic train.
After 8 hours of demanding warm up session,
loco starts to run whistling down the tracks blowing puffy air from its
tungsten and with every horn it started picking up its speed and steaming down
it tooted again indicating re run was thriving. Steam engine is named after a
glory of Akbar a 16th century Mughal emperor and it is a last
existing steam engine in the nation.
With its arrival back on track it has
proved its might and with its entry a bollywood movies are circling around to
feature this train on their for instance recent Bhaag Milkha Bhaag are some of
the brilliant roles where it will play its part.
The engine would run along the mainline
throughout the year, drawing luxury tourist trains from Delhi to Alwar,
portending steam engine heritage tourism in India
With around 30 parallel steam engine
trains, some built by Lancashire-based British locomotive builder Vulcan
Foundries and others by Chittaranjan Loco works, country is slowly looking to
build a heritage tourism map.
The first attempt to reinstate steam
engines in India was made in 1998, when the oldest was made by England in 1855,
with a top of 40 km per hour. But the regulative feature had to be maintained
through a vintage technology which was not adequate in the shores of world.
Basically a road to restore the steam
locomotives have passed through rough lines and what’s more challenging was to
restore the rusting loco sheds.
To reinstate steam locomotives first thing
we had to do was we restored 120 year old Rewari Steam Loco Shed, which was
followed under a strict and expert guidance of steam railway operators from
across the world. Ashwani Lohani, chief mechanical engineer, Indian Railways
northern, said they also equipped the Amritsar locomotive workshop with the
technology needed to restore these engines.
