A station porter pushes a wooden cart loaded with sacks of flour.

It’s still well before dawn.

I’ve just got off the Brahmaputra Mail at New Jalpaiguri.

My friends Finn and Cameron and I have spent a sedentary 30 hours riding it after catching out from Old Delhi, 1,400 kilometres away.

We’ve come this far to catch the famous, narrow-gauge Darjeeling Himalayan Railway “toy train” that takes passengers from this lowland north Indian city up into the Himalayas.

It’s 4:30am, which is not a wholesome time of day to hang around in public anywhere, and I’ve privately been nervous about loitering at so early a time.

So far, at least, railway stations have proven to be the easiest place for a visitor to kill time in India safely and without being hassled too much—people have trains to catch and their lives to get on with.

According to our internet sleuthing, the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway is scheduled to depart in five and a half hours, at 10am.

Everyone in India wants to do you a favour

We have zero idea whether it’s actually running, so we head to one of the paid lounges to check.

Today’s departure is confirmed, and we’re thrilled.

It’s difficult to deduce an accurate timetable for this tiny and much-loved train online and, at this late stage, we’re fully committed with no alternative plans.

Nothing much happens during our long wait.

At around 8am, we’re approached by a moustachioed man with a severe expression and stiff body language.

He’s very keen to know what our travel plans are.

“Darjeeling,” we say.

“There is no train to Darjeeling,” he confidently replies.

The lounge is tiled with posters of this famous train hissing its way up the tea slopes, engineers hanging valiantly out the side.

And, to even gain entry to these lounges, you must present a valid train ticket, the details on which are checked against the de facto Indian Railways timetable.

We say as much to the stern man, but he won’t listen (or doesn’t understand), and instead insists that we take a taxi up to Darjeeling and there is. Definitely. No. Train.

As if in a comedy sketch, he makes all this fuss with his back directly to one of the posters.

People in India are fond of pretending to do you favours, and, adhering to this stereotype, the man heads over to the lounge’s ticket wallah to wave his arms and make a fuss on our behalf.

Upon his return, he confesses with much solemnity, like it’s bad news, that there is indeed a train to Darjeeling.

Anxious not to lose face, he then informs us that he was once a sergeant in the Indian Army, and vigorously shakes our hands.

When he finally leaves, a portly and smiling Sikh inquires about our travel plans… so it goes on.

Waiting on the tiny platform

A token payment is required to use the toilets in the lounge. I outsmart myself and pay for four pisses in advance.

After payment, there is a shift change, and the new guardian of the toilet, unaware of my down payment, denies me entry. I should have asked for a letter of credit.

With an hour to go before departure, we head to the platform.

The morning is hazy and sepia with pollution. There’s no chance for an early glimpse of the majestic Himalayan range.

The platform for the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (DHR) is just a few bricks high and is slightly removed from the full-gauge tracks; a narrow strip of track that runs the entire length of the station and passes through some engineering sheds.

A few hundred metres away, it disappears around a bend behind some rather ill-looking palm trees.

A plaque stands at the near end of the station, celebrating the UNESCO World Heritage status of the line.

The way the action of daily life encroaches irreverently upon the line seems odd, but is hardly outstanding. The Pyramids of Giza only just manage to fend off the sprawl of Cairo.

And, unlike the DHR, the pyramids serve no urban need.

Like any other train

The DHR runs like any regular passenger service on Indian Railways, and this is perhaps its most remarkable feature—book a ticket, show up, and catch out.

The outbound service from New Jalpaiguri is Indian Railways train #52541.

Carrying so few passengers (about two dozen), the service generally runs at full capacity but still makes a loss. Yet the line is cherished and continues to run, almost 150 years after it was completed. Probably, it’s someone’s weekly or monthly commute.

While we wait for the train’s arrival, a short young man with pointy features and alert movements appears.

He works for Indian Railways and, along with the driver, the conductor, and a few other staff, is responsible for getting the train and its passengers safely up and down the hills.

He tells us that the diesel locomotive hauling us today has just come out of the workshop after some repairs, and that the line has only just reopened after being damaged by landslides, which are very common in the Darjeeling area during the monsoon rains.

He’s genial and wears western clothes.

The rest of today’s passengers also start to appear.

There’s a young couple clearly on a date; a family of three or four with an absurd amount of luggage; two dapper and mischievous friends; and a few solo travellers who look bored and uninterested, like this is their hundredth trip.

Finn, Cameron, and I are the only obvious foreign passengers.

All around us, heavy brown locomotives growl past, making the ground shake slightly as they go. They are massive, angry hulks with huge inertia, oblivious to all but their signals like obedient attack dogs.

But it’s the toy train that steals everyone’s attention when it appears from around the bend.

Boxy, painted in a rather placid blue and white livery, and hauling two passenger cars each the size of a garden greenhouse, it looks extremely out of place among India’s mighty sleeper trains.

But sleekness, speed, and range, it is not built for—it’s designed to climb. And it has its very own track to do it on.

A brief history of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway

The DHR was chipped out of the steep Himalayan piedmont by the “plucky” Brits and was completed in 1881 when India was under the complete and unfair control of the English Crown.

This fact, and the mobilisation of a workforce of native labourers, go a long way to explaining how its construction was completed in just two years despite the extremely difficult terrain.

Over a distance of 88 kilometres, the line ascends from around 300 feet above sea level at New Jalpaiguri to 7,400 feet at Ghum. This, the penultimate stop, is the highest railway station in India and another UNESCO World Heritage Site.

After Ghum (pronounced “Goom”), the line descends gently into Darjeeling.

Originally conceived as an expedient way to transport goods up the hillside and link Darjeeling with the then capital of the Raj, Kolkata, the line has been superseded by road transport.

Even though a road now connects Darjeeling to New Jalpaiguri, and its twin city Siliguri, the DHR remains a nostalgic anachronism enjoyed (or endured) by passengers who prefer taking the scenic route.

What might its designers and builders think if they could see now that the goods carried by their railway, excavated manfully from the Himalayas, are some overpriced marble souvenirs that three tourists brought from the Taj Mahal, some illicit booze leftover from a Hindu wedding, and three rucksacks stuffed with soiled clothes?

Probably, booze has always been on the manifest, and they would be pleased that it still runs, just like today’s passengers.

Inside the toy carriages

Our airy coach for the eight-hour journey seats twelve.

With everyone’s luggage, a toy toilet, and a few train staff, the occupants are very tightly squeezed in.

But it’s not uncomfortable.

Some key bolt in my chair has broken, causing it to be stuck in a permanently reclined position.

Being a tall man, I shamelessly delight in being the perpetrator rather than victim of this public transport faux pas.

And everywhere you care to look, there is a view.

Thoughtfully, the carriages have been designed to maximize the amount of natural light, like a Victorian glasshouse.

A good thing that is too, as, on this working-day-long journey, there is little else to do but gaze out of the window.

Bodies awaiting cremation near New Jalpaiguri

The plains between New Jalpaiguri and Siliguri are a vast expanse of scrub and trash.

The most impoverished loiter on the tracks. Children pick up rubbish and throw it at the train as we pass.

But trash isn’t the saddest sight.

Cremation is how Hindus prefer to bring the bodily form of their deceased to a reverent end, and it’s not uncommon to see bodies awaiting cremation.

Barely out of New Jalpaiguri, we pass by two bodies.

One lies beside an emblematic arrangement of their worldly belongings, placed respectfully in a funereal shrine—bottles of this person’s favourite liquor and a pack of playing cards, fanned out.

This touching arrangement is their last dignification.

The other body has no such effects.

It’s very common in India to see travellers and homeless people completely wrapped up in blankets, sleeping head-to-toe in the most unlikely places.

But lifelessness is uncannily and unsettlingly easy to recognize.

Too soon after this sight we stop, with the indifference of a nation, to take aboard sand to grit the rails while the train staff sip masala chai and natter.

“Anything you need, just ask,” instructs our stout conductor.

What we need is to get moving again.

Our fellow passengers, used to sights that would stun even the most stouthearted visitor into silence, gleefully take photos of the carriage interior.

A child‑beggar presents her cupped hands up to the window. They don’t open and never have. Hers is a sad and conditioned motion to sight of comparative wealth.

Outriders, slums, and smog

Our train has an outrider, possibly a signalman or traffic marshal.

When we’ve taken onboard our full load of sand, he drains his chai and takes off on a shiny Royal Enfield motorbike, and our powerful diesel locomotive, which is anything but a toy, drags us onward.

We travel at a jogging pace.

Stores, snacks, and corrugated tin roofs pass within inches of the carriage.

People and stalls fold themselves back away from the tracks as our train approaches, bellowing its horn.

For the vast majority of the day when there is no train, this track triples up as a market and footpath.

Eventually, the hanging slums of Siliguri peter out and are replaced by wide, lowland tea gardens.

They are pretty enough, but look rather gasping and unhealthy in the midwinter month of February and its accompanying pall of smog.

Rubbish snags at their edges, being so close to the town as they are.

Beyond more gardens and walled compounds, the track moves adjacent to Hill Cart Road.

This lane twists and climbs up to the highland settlements and on into the unimaginably different landscape of the Himalayas. Hill town, stupa, glacier.

Into the forest at Sukna

At Sukna, we start on a gentle ascent into the jungle, home to lush trees, Langur monkeys, and all manner of exotic species that hide out of sight, rightfully wary of human contact.

The road and the train track are soon forced to make tight hairpin turns to overcome the gradient, and the tracks cross to the outside of the road to widen the bend.

Turn conquered, it crosses straight back to the inside again, road traffic be damned.

Drivers and motorcyclists, forced to give way to us, excitedly whip out their phones to snap photos of this famous train passing just a few car lengths in front.

Some of them wave, and we wave back.

It’s not long before the views on the outside of these hairpin turns begin to drop away, presenting to us only the canopy of the jungle through which we ascended a turn ago.

Sometimes, the gradient becomes too steep for the train to manage during a single 180° bend.

When this happens, we stop, and a man in a concrete bunker changes the direction of a point.

The driver then backs the train up the hill in reverse to another point.

The same man then dashes to the second point and changes it to the uphill direction with a giant lever, and we go forwards on our long climb.

This manoeuvre is known as a “z-turn.”

Crossing the roads dozens of times and with the occasional lurching z-turn, our train determinedly hauls up the flanks of the mountains for several hours.

Where there isn’t enough land on the outside of the bends to accommodate the track, we pass over little arced bridges made of wooden sleepers that ford the yawning gaps.

The drop beneath them is frightening.

Waterfalls, barely a trickle at this time of year, eat away at bends that cut into the hillside too, forcing us to pass over more bridges.

As we do, we get the perfect view of these waterfalls cutting diagonally beneath us, steaming in the humidity.

And there are more tricks to this tiny train yet.

We pull a dizzying 270° turn around some small, colourful hutments and pass over our own tracks to emerge on a high shelf.

The cloud layer lies below us as we traverse the inside arc of a valley wall. To our right, the land falls away into mists with breathtaking sheerness.

Vaporous puffs roll up to meet us as we turn to the right, then to the left, into a deep gorge.

There is a settlement above us—literally draped onto the hillside. One good rain would wash it off, like rinsing the loose grime from an alloy wheel.

Lunch in the hills with monkeys

The employee who told us earlier that the train had been recently repaired took everybody’s lunch order soon after we pulled out of New Jalpaiguri and phoned them up the hill so that lunch would be ready by the time we’re due to arrive.

It’s a fantastic idea, but we avoid partaking in case the meal incapacitates us and spoils our time in Darjeeling, where we assume edible, bowel-friendly food will be easy to find.

Finn has already caught a tummy bug and is only just beginning to recover, which is another reason to skip lunch. So we subsist on the Bombay mix and biscuits we brought way back in Old Delhi

Today is a Sunday. We’ve been lounging on the Brahmaputra mail since Friday night, so we aren’t very hungry anyway.

The lunch stop gives us time to disembark and appreciate the slow transformation of the tropical jungle into a temperate forest.

Langurs sit hunched by the tracks, picking at things with disdainful air that’s unique to monkeys and children forced to eat vegetables.

It’s very quiet without the locomotive blasting its horn at the traffic, and we can hear the song of unfamiliar birds.

Looking up at the locomotive, it’s obvious that the label “toy train” is an affectionate misnomer—it’s a full-sized diesel traction engine, shrink-wrapped, and set upon narrow bogeys.

In fact, it looks rather like a shunter you might see in Europe building freight trains, with a cabin about the size of a garden shed welded onto a vented box of engine cowling.

A fleet of these shrunken diesel locomotives perform the daily passenger service between New Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling.

Further up the line, we meet our twin train heading down the hill—the delightfully named “Tridhara.”

The name is derived from Sanskrit and means “three streams.” It is also the name of a Hindu temple in the Indian state of West Bengal dedicated to Radha and Krishna.

Up in Darjeeling, saddle-tanked steam locomotives take delighted passengers “joyrides” along shorter branches of the DHR, something the sergeant down in New Jalpaiguri would have learned if he had turned around.

To stay on time, everyone must finish their lunch on the train.

When a loud blast of the horn signals it’s time to press on, all the passengers clamber back aboard with their rotis and curries, ready for what a cake lover might call the “bigger half” of the journey.

In harmony with the beauty of the surroundings

Describing the Kangra Valley Line in his journal Landour Days, Ruskin Bond remarks that the line is “visible proof that a railway construction engineer can create a work which is in complete harmony with the beauty of the surroundings.”

And that “without in any way interfering with the grandeur of mountain or valley, the railway engineers on this line have revealed to the traveller a land of great enchantment.”

It’s a description too accurate not to borrow.

The DHR follows perfectly the natural contours of the Himalayan foothills.

Unobstructed by dark tunnels or human-made structures of any kind, vista follows vista, left, right, and back again as our train treads its narrow path upwards, deeper into the clouds.

Clouds alone cloak the more ravishing views of the Great Himalaya range, and only they have that right.

The chosen route for this line is as carefully selected and diligently followed as any holy mountain pilgrimage.

In the towns through which we occasionally pass, the route is no less gentle and respectful to the life and landscape of the hills.

No gullies have been dynamited out. No railway viaducts tarnish the scenery.

Concessions to swift and easy transport, so often hated by the subsequent generations forced to endure their ugly presence, have been left behind at sea level.

Around midafternoon, we arrive in Kurseong.

The train dutifully pulls over to the right-hand side and follows a thin ribbon of pavement through the town like every other hill porter.

Masala chai at Kurseong

Kurseong is set into such a steep hillside and its structures are so fragile-looking, it feels like we’re on the set of a spaghetti western movie that has been rotated 90° gyroscopically.

On walking into any of the buildings, one half expects to find it to be but a thin, cleverly-painted facade propped up by wooden two-by-fours.

Kurseong Railway Station is small, and inside, a young woman with strong Indo–Chinese features presides over… nothing.

The dark and drafty atrium is empty. There’s no chai or warm food on offer, and all I manage to buy is a box of wheaty biscuits. I wasn’t offered change when I paid.

I have an awful headache coming on and there is a biting winter chill in the air now, so I head across the road and buy a steaming cup of masala chai to nurse my symptoms.

It has immediate and strong restorative effects.

Like covering your head while wandering in the desert or indulging in a deep-fried chocolate bar, my piping hot brew is strong evidence for imitating local habits while travelling.

With the hot chai spilling and burning my fingers, I dash back to the train with my adventurous friends for the last leg of the journey to Darjeeling.

A land of mountains and mudslides

India is a vast country with a single time zone, and we’re very far to its east.

An early and very wintry dusk descends quickly upon us.

The sunset happens entirely behind the clouds and fog that fully envelops these hills in winter, and I have to put on my cardigan that has doubled up as my pillow on my previous train journeys across India.

We started our day passing through lime-coloured lowland jungle—all hanging roots and epiphytes, orchids and monkeys.

Now, we are in a high-altitude cloud forest of dark pine and cedar that tower rather than sprawl.

Homes and shops back directly onto a diaphanous, milky abyss.

The cared-for ones have gardens on their rooftops. Many others have been abandoned due to landslides, and lie half destroyed; the annual monsoon’s toll upon these hills.

But, like a dandelion growing from the kerb or a hardy little wallflower, life up here flourishes despite the harsh climate.

Wherever the rains have ripped away the outside lane, a cordon is erected and traffic is conducted through a single lane while the road is ingeniously repaired or reclaimed from the hill.

Up at these heights, our train sticks cautiously to the insides of the bends (and so many bends!)

Hill life appears to have little to do with lowland India, and the uphill end of the DHR is basically a lofty island off the coast of the mainland.

The people, vehicles, and homes look very different from those 70 kilometres away and 7,000 feet below us. Close to, yet somehow as remote from Siliguri as Siliguri is from Stevenage.

Ghum. India's highest railway station

At dusk, we approach Ghum.

The climate has changed so dramatically from this morning that I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Bavarian-style winter market complete with fairy lights, a helter-skelter, and steaming currywursts sold by the hundred from a temporary wooden bungalow; children in mittens waving light-up candy canes.

Except, of course, we’re not in Northern Europe and Christmas was five weeks ago.

But this is the gloomy, wet, low-hanging evening you get anywhere in that region between October and March. Small wonder homesick colonialists were attracted to these hills.

And we’re still on this tiny train!

As we pass into Ghum, mist-wetted roads press like snakes rained from their den against the tracks. Everyone’s lights are on indoors now, and pedestrians wear bright puffer jackets to fend off the cold.

The thick fog and blind bends cause the train driver to blow his horn incessantly.

My throbbing brain feels like it’s being fired out of a pinhole above my left eye, but I keep the misery inside, as one should when travelling as a group along pre-agreed and non-negotiable routes.

Besides, my smile for our group photo at India’s highest railway station looks genuine enough.

Pulling into Darjeeling. The queen of the hills

An hour later, and eight hours after we left New Jalpaiguri, we descend into Darjeeling.

Has anyone written about how arrival by night into a fantastic new location differs from arrival by day?

I’m not sure, but it’s into the hours of leisure, not industry, that we step down from our carriage and relearn how our legs work.

Groups of friends loiter beside open bonfires on the wonky paths. No path is straight in Darjeeling.

So here we are, at our final stop on our first ever journey across India.

The train that has travelled the least far has definitely carried us the farthest.