Great Indian Peninsula Railway
By 3:30 in the afternoon all the lucky people - both ladies and gentlemen, Indian and Europeans - who had been invited to travel in the train were comfortably ensconced in their seats and were raring to go. Then a royal salute was fired from the ramparts of Fort St. George and the 14-coach train, pulled by three steam engines gave a shrill whistle and surged forward much to the awe and amazement of those left behind on the platform.
All along the way, people watched and cheered from windows and rooftops and tops of trees as the iron wonder puffed and chugged and whistled its way out of the city and snaked through the countryside to its final destination, Tanna (now Thane), 34 kilometers away. The journey took about an hour. Bombayites talked of nothing else but their train over the next few weeks.
That first train which carried about 500 passengers set in motion, literally, the wheels of the Indian Railways which today carries 24 million passengers daily and is one of the world's largest railway networks.
