First Railway in India
The earliest proposals for railways in India were made in Great Britain in the 1840s. The proposals involved construction of Railways by companies incorporated in England and a minimum profit being guaranteed by the East India Company. With this, the people out there started entering into lobbying in support of these proposals by banks, traders, shipping companies etc. On 1 June 1845, the East India Railway Company was established in London with a capital of UGB 4 million, most of which was raised in London. Similarly, the on August 1, 1849, the Great Indian Peninsula Railway was incorporated via an act of the British Parliament.
Sindh, Sultan and Sahib
During Lord Dalhousie’s regime, on April 16, 1853 at 3:35pm a train with 14 railway carriages and 400 guests left Bombay’s Bori Bunder for Thane, with a 21-gun salute. The three locomotives were fancily named Sindh, Sultan, and Sahib. This 75 minutes journey was the first Journey of Indian Railway that embarked an era of development thereafter.
The Thomason Loco
However, the above was a passenger service and we have traces of Railway in terms of freight career from an earlier date also. In 1851, a steam loco, Thomason, was used for transporting construction material in Roorkee for the Solani viaduct, which was a part of the construction in the Salony Valley. The locomotive Thomason was assembled on the spot from parts transported from Calcutta. Second locomotive to arrive in India was Falkland (named for a governor of Bombay), used by the contractors of the GIPR for shunting operations on the first line out of Bombay that was being built.
First Railway Foundry
From the modest beginning in 1853, the development of Railway was very fast. The first railway foundry was set up at Jamalpur Workshop in 1893 and it produced the first steam locomotive in 1899. By 1900, around 40000 kilometer of railway was completed. However, in the next 50 years, the construction got slackened and only 16000 kilometers of Railway line was constructed in next 50 years.
