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The Great Indian Peninsula Railway – the GIPR – is the railway that operated India’s first commercial passenger line between Bombay and Thane in 1853. The Bombay-Thane line was not merely India’s first passenger railway route. It was the beginning of a system that transformed the country. The railway that began with three locomotives, 14 coaches and about 400 passengers on April 16, 1853 eventually grew into the vast Indian Railways network. And today’s central railway suburban system still runs across much of that original landscape. That continuity is extraordinary. We should be proud of it. But pride cannot simply mean celebrating the first train every April 16 and then allowing the physical evidence of that story to disappear year after year.

This August, that question has arrived at Sion.

A portion of the old Sion railway station, on the original Bombay-Thane line of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway (GIPR), is being dismantled to make way for railway expansion. Among the elements that could disappear along with the old station hut (used as station manager’s cabin) are old iron roof brackets bearing the imprint of the GIPR era.

I have appealed for at least some of these brackets to be carefully removed and preserved – at the CSMT heritage gallery, the outdoor exhibition gully or the National Rail Museum. The railway board’s heritage directorate has acknowledged the appeal to save the Sion relics, while the Rail Enthusiasts’ Society has extended formidable support to the effort.

This is not the first time I have made such an appeal.

I have been fighting this battle for over three decades now.

My subject is the GIPR, the railway that operated India’s first commercial passenger line between Bombay and Thane in 1853. The extraordinary thing about this railway is that much of its original alignment survives within today’s Mumbai suburban system. The trains have changed, the traction has changed, the stations have changed, and the railway is now central railway. But the basic geography of that first line remains remarkably alive. The relics here talk to tell the story of the first railway line which can be elaborately read in my first book Halt Station India, The Dramatic Tale of the Nation’s First Rail Lines.

Scattered along it are the last physical witnesses to that beginning.

Some are substantial structures. Others are tiny pieces of iron.

To most........

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