Archivists at the National Railway Museum (NRM) in the heart of New Delhi were puzzled when, last year, they chanced upon more than a dozen unidentified, grainy, sepia-toned photos from the late 1800s lying hidden among their collection of old documents.
There were 18 in all — six photos each of tall bridges cutting across rocky, hilly terrain, tunnels for railway lines to pass through, and labourers toiling away on the construction site.
Railway officials ran multiple searches to pinpoint the location of the tunnels in India and failed initially. “The tunnels did not exist within India’s present boundary. But the photos were literally calling out to us. One of the tunnels was named ‘Mary Jane (1894)’, another was called ‘Pir Panjeh’, yet another ‘Mushkaf’,” says Deepakshi Sharma, museum consultant at NRM. In yet other photos, labourers working on the construction site appeared to be in Indian attire.
The Pir Panjeh tunnel along the Mushkaf-Bolan line. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Almost as if connecting the pieces of a jigsaw, the team stumbled upon a research paper written by a British rail engineer, James Ramsay, titled ‘The Mushkaf-Bolan Railway, Baluchistan, India’. The 26-page report described the hardships incurred over multiple decades in constructing a railway line cutting through the Bolan Pass in Balochistan — an 89-km strategic mountain pass — during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, 1878-1880.
Complementing the photographs and the research paper were old maps, which neatly charted out how railway lines snaked through from Delhi right up to the Balochistan province neighbouring the Afghan border.
Digitising over two million papers and photos
Indian Railways is in the process of digitising a massive archive of over two million pages and photographs going back to the 19th century. Other archival material includes old orders, time tables, books, manuals, engineering drawings, letters, technical diagrams and annual reports. “These documents are mostly located in the archives of NRM in Delhi and the Rail Museum in Tiruchirappali,” says Vinita Srivastava, Executive Director (Heritage), Ministry of Railways.
Back then, to construct a rail line until Quetta, capital of the Balochistan province (in modern-day Pakistan), was no mean feat. The railway line through the Bolan Pass, controlled by Pakistan Railways today, was the third attempt at laying tracks through the pass which connects the towns of Quetta and Sibi in Balochistan.
Load-testing on the track. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Under construction. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
The chance discovery of these documentsled to the archiving of the story of the Mushkaf-Bolan railway, and is an important piece of the puzzle that explains how India lost control of the deep-sea port at Gwadar (which lies at the end of the Bolan Pass rail line) after Partition. Balochistan was served by the erstwhile North Western Railway, starting 1886 in undivided India, and handed over to Pakistan in 1947.
“This area is at the forefront of major geopolitical events and is strategically important because of the high concentration of natural resources such oil, coal, gold, copper and gas reserves, and also links to the deep-sea port at Gwadar,” says a railways official.
On Partition Remembrance Day (August 14) last year, Indian Railways displayed the exhibits to pay tribute to the labourers, mostly of South Asian descent (identified as Punjabis, Hazaras and Afghans), who worked on the treacherous construction project. “They strove through disease, floods and natural disasters. The military advantage (faster movement of troops) was secured at a huge cost of men and material,” says the official.
Labourers, mostly of South Asian descent — Punjabis, Hazaras and Afghans — on the Bolan Pass site. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Horseshoe-shaped tunnels
The documentation of the Mushkaf-Bolan railway also holds precious lessons in mountain rail engineering. For instance, the archival photos depict horseshoe-shaped tunnel structures of solid brick masonry in Portland-Cement mortar. They have withstood the terrain’s unpredictable climatic conditions for centuries, the process of load-testing on the girder of the bridges, construction work on piers of the bridges, and the use of steel girders designed to carry heavy engines.
Today, horseshoe-shaped tunnels — as opposed to D-shaped tunnels — to ward off landslides have been employed in the Udhampur-Srinagar- Baramulla Rail Link (USBRL) project, which connects Kashmir to the rest of India. The tunnels traverse tricky terrains and connect two ends of the world’s highest railway bridge, the Chenab Rail Bridge, which falls along the USBRL.
(Travelling along this 19th century railway line will now entail taking a train from Delhi to Lahore. Further, trains depart regularly from Lahore, Peshawar and Karachi for Quetta.)
porechamaitri.m@thehindu.co.in
Published - April 14, 2023 12:02 pm IST
