John Keay
Riding the Gravy Train
Railways and the Raj: How the Age of Steam Transformed India
By Christian Wolmar
Atlantic Books 363pp £25 order from our bookshop
Things aren’t what they used to be on Indian Railways. There was a time when, on boarding a long-distance train, you were invited to fill in a menu form for as many lunches, dinners and breakfasts as your journey looked likely to entail. The form was then collected and you forgot what you’d written. But thirty-six hours later and half a subcontinent away, as the train ground to a halt at some unfancied station in the middle of nowhere, there, on a platform peppered by the first rays of the rising sun, breakfast number two was waiting. It was on a tray, one of several, stacked pagoda-like on the head of an aproned bearer as he stood to attention in the golden light. Seconds later the selfsame bearer appeared by your side, bringing omelette (usually Spanish), toast (wrapped in a napkin), butter and jam (in electroplated dishes), juice (in a glass) and a cup and saucer (to await the separate beverage service). It was all as ordered, though how the system worked in those presatellite days was a mystery. At the time, say 1970, it took longer to book a super-fast ‘lightning’ call to such a remote destination than to travel there by train.
Nowadays meals come as a selection of prepacked items in a floppy box. The omelette oozes from its tin-foil wrapping, the bread, sweating in a tissue, is a ready-buttered sandwich, and the cereal is always cornflakes.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553