Halfway to Heaven : Darjeeling and Its Mountain Railway

Beskrivning:

to Heaven

DARJEELING
AND ITS
REMARKABLE RAILWAY


India is everything you want or not want it
to be! It is a land of palaces and poverty of
the enlightened and the pedantic, it
embraces the exotic and the mundane. It has
a culture of dynamic enterprise and of
countless beliefs, where one-sixth of
mankind lives on one-fortieth of its surface,
ranging from the highest mountains in the
World to one of the largest deserts. It is a
land of extremes.

The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway bears
witness to this, and captures the imagination
of all who take the train that works its way
from the cauterising heat of the plains into
the shadow of Kanchenjunga, the third
highest mountain on Earth.

One can only speculate whether it was
naivety or the single minded belief that a
railway to Darjeeling should have been built
in the first place. No proper survey had been
made prior to the laying of the track, which
followed a road originally designed for
animals to haul carts to Darjeeling, and
nobody was surprised when the train fell off
the rails five times on opening day!

Until now, so little has been known about the
history of what is undoubtedly one of the
most famous railways in the World, but then
that would come as no surprise to anybody
who had more than a passing acquaintance
with India. For the very first time, its history
has been extensively researched from archive
material and personal memories scattered
across the World. It has weathered the
ferocity of monsoons, the upheaval of
politics and the devouring march of
modernisation for over 120 years. But then
India is a land of survivors.

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