THREE RAILWAYS, THREE WORLDS

A winter journey through India's mountain rail heritage — from the Eastern Himalayas to the former Summer Capital of the Raj.

27 December – 9 January · Darjeeling · Kangra · Shimla · 14 Nights · Private Charters

There is a particular kind of romance that belongs only to mountain railways — the slow, labouring ascent through clouds, the sudden revelation of a valley a thousand metres below, the smell of coal smoke mixing with pine and altitude. India has more of this romance than anywhere else on earth. And almost all of it is concentrated along three lines that together trace an extraordinary arc across the subcontinent's northern rim.

The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, the Kangra Valley Railway, the Kalka–Shimla Railway. Two of them are UNESCO World Heritage sites. All three are narrow-gauge masterpieces of Victorian and Edwardian engineering, built across terrain that most sensible people would have declared impassable. Together, they form the spine of what may be the greatest railway journey available to the modern traveller — not the fastest, not the longest, but the most layered in history, the most dramatic in landscape, and the most alive with the feeling that you have arrived somewhere the world has not entirely caught up with yet.

The Grand Indian Mountain Railways Expedition, running each winter across Christmas and New Year, connects all three in a single curated journey. It begins in the Eastern Himalayas on 27 December and concludes in Delhi on 9 January — fourteen nights that span two UNESCO World Heritage lines, one of India's great secrets, three colonial hill stations, a New Year celebrated at 7,000 feet, and more locomotive history than most railway enthusiasts encounter in a lifetime of travel.

This is what lies ahead.

Private Charter for the Photography Tour, on the way to Tindharia. (May 2026)

PART ONE · 27 DECEMBER – 1 JANUARY

THE DARJEELING HIMALAYAN RAILWAY — WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

The Little Train That Conquered the Himalayas

In 1878, a British civil servant named Franklin Prestage proposed something that his contemporaries considered either visionary or absurd: a narrow-gauge railway climbing from the Bengal plains into the Himalayas, covering 78 kilometres and ascending nearly 2,000 metres through some of the most challenging topography in Asia. Within three years, it was built. By 1881, the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway was carrying passengers, mail and tea from the foothills to the cloud-wrapped hill station that the British had been developing for decades as their preferred escape from the Indian summer.

The engineering solutions required to build it were extraordinary. The line had no tunnels to speak of — too expensive, too slow. Instead, its builders devised a series of dramatic zigzags and reverse loops that allowed the locomotive to gain altitude by switching direction repeatedly, inching upwards on gradients that would challenge far larger machines. The most celebrated of these manoeuvres — the Batasia Loop near Darjeeling, where the track spirals through a complete circle of gardens and war memorials — became one of the most photographed railway features in Asia. It remains so today.

The DHR's locomotives are B-class 0-4-0 saddle tanks, the same basic design that has pulled trains up this hillside since the 1880s. They are small — almost comically so beside the broad-gauge giants of India's main lines — but they are remarkably powerful for their size, and the sight of one working hard through the mist above a tea garden, exhaust punching white against the green, is one that lodges permanently in the memory. In 1999, UNESCO recognised what generations of travellers had always known: that the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway was not merely a piece of transport infrastructure but a world heritage — a living monument to human ingenuity and ambition. It was only the second railway on earth to receive that inscription.

Siliguri to Darjeeling — the Long Climb into the Clouds

The expedition assembles in Siliguri — the busy, sprawling junction city at the foot of the hills where the narrow-gauge DHR meets the broad-gauge main line from Kolkata. Siliguri is not, in itself, a destination; it is a threshold, a place of transition, the point at which the vast horizontal flatness of the Bengal plains buckles upward and becomes the Himalayas. The air here already carries a different quality from the cities of the plains: cooler, damper, faintly scented with tea and the river. On a clear evening, the distant ridge of the hills turns purple and then dark against the sky.

The private charter departs Siliguri on the morning of 28 December. Within minutes of leaving the station, the transformation begins. The flatlands dissolve. The DHR tilts upward. The locomotive — a B-class steam engine prepared for the charter at the Siliguri shed — begins the long, patient, rhythmic labour of ascent. It does not hurry. It has never hurried. The DHR's service speed is roughly 15 kilometres per hour on the steeper sections, which is precisely right: fast enough to feel like progress, slow enough to watch the landscape reveal itself.

The tea gardens begin almost immediately above the town. West Bengal's Terai district produces some of the finest tea in India — not the first-flush Darjeeling teas of the higher slopes, but sturdy, full-bodied garden teas that supply much of the country's domestic market. The bushes stretch in perfect rows across the hillsides, interrupted by the workers' lines and the factory buildings with their tall chimneys, and the railway passes through all of it at arm's reach, the train threading between the bushes on a track so narrow it seems almost apologetic about its presence in the landscape.

At Tindharia, roughly a third of the way up, the group stops for lunch and for one of the expedition's most privileged experiences: a visit to the Tindharia Railway Workshop. This is not a museum. It is a functioning maintenance facility for the DHR's steam fleet, and it has been operating continuously since the 1880s. The machinery in some of the sheds is Victorian — lathes and drill presses of the kind that equipped the great engineering workshops of industrial Britain, still turning, still cutting, still making the parts that keep the locomotives running. The craftsmen who work here are the inheritors of a tradition that stretches back without interruption to the railway's construction. The knowledge of how to maintain a B-class DHR locomotive — its particular quirks of temperament, the tolerances that its age demands, the sounds it makes when something is not quite right — lives in these workshops and nowhere else on earth.

Kurseong — the Place of the White Orchid

The section of line above Tindharia is the one that stops conversation. The track clings to hillsides so steep that looking out of the carriage window on the valley side means looking almost directly down, the ground falling away hundreds of metres to the river far below. Viaducts carry the line across gorges on stone arches that were laid by hand in the 1870s and show no signs of giving up. Rhododendrons press in from the cutting walls on either side. The locomotive labours and breathes. The silence between exhaust beats is filled with birdsong and the sound of water.

Kurseong — which translates from the local Lepcha language as 'the place of the white orchid' — sits at about 1,500 metres and is reached on the afternoon of the 29th. It is a town that Darjeeling's more famous neighbour has somehow overshadowed, which is precisely what makes it remarkable. Where Darjeeling has become self-consciously touristic, Kurseong remains genuinely itself: a working hill town of colonial-era schools, Catholic convents, small monasteries, and tea estates that produce some of the finest orthodox teas in the Darjeeling classification. The town is built along a single ridge, its main street wide and unhurried, the views from its terraces encompassing the full depth of the valley below. On clear evenings, the lights of Siliguri flicker in the distant plains like a memory of the place you left two days ago.

Ghum & the Batasia Loop — the Highest Station, the Most Famous Loop

The final section of the ascent passes through the railway's most dramatic landmarks. Ghum station, at 2,257 metres above sea level, is the highest railway station in India. It sits in a small saddle in the ridge where the wind comes in cold from Tibet and the deodar trees lean permanently away from it, and on clear days the view north is almost incomprehensible: the full Kanchenjunga massif, the third-highest mountain on earth, white and enormous and close enough to feel implausible.

Below Ghum, the Batasia Loop is the DHR's crowning engineering gesture. The line, needing to lose altitude more gently than the terrain permits, traces a complete circle through a beautifully maintained garden of marigolds and chrysanthemums, passing over itself on a bridge before continuing the descent. At the centre of the loop stands a war memorial to the Gorkha soldiers of the region — a dignified and moving monument in an unexpectedly beautiful setting.

Darjeeling — the Queen of the Hills, and a New Year in the Clouds

Darjeeling is one of those places whose reputation precedes it so thoroughly that the actual town can come as a mild surprise. It is not grand in the way that Shimla is grand, with its broad Raj boulevards and mock-Tudor theatres. It is steeper, more cramped, more chaotic, a town that has grown without plan up and down a ridge so narrow that some of its streets can only be navigated on foot. But its extraordinary quality is the same one it has possessed since the British first established a sanatorium here in 1835: the feeling of being simultaneously at the edge of the world and at the centre of something immensely alive.

The tea that made Darjeeling famous is grown on the slopes immediately surrounding the town. The first-flush teas of spring — plucked in March and April from bushes dormant through the winter — are among the most expensive and sought-after teas on earth, sold at auction to buyers from Japan, Germany and the UK for prices that would astonish anyone accustomed to thinking of tea as an everyday commodity. The gardens closest to Darjeeling — Happy Valley, Goomtee, Makaibari — have been producing first-flush teas for over 150 years, many of their bushes original plantings with root systems now penetrating several metres into the Himalayan soil.

The town rewards unhurried exploration. The Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, established in 1954 following Tenzing Norgay's ascent of Everest with Edmund Hillary, displays equipment and photographs from the great expeditions of the twentieth century. The Padmaja Naidu Zoological Park is home to red pandas — those improbable rust-coloured relatives of the raccoon found in the wild only in a narrow band of eastern Himalayan forest — alongside the Himalayan wolf and snow leopard.

The expedition spends New Year's Eve in Darjeeling, raising a glass in a traditional pub in the town centre as midnight arrives quietly in the hills. It is, by some distance, one of the finest places in the world to greet a new year — the mountains close above you in the darkness, the town's lights scattered across the ridge below, and the knowledge that somewhere up there, beyond the cloud, Kanchenjunga is waiting for the dawn.

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PART TWO · 2 – 5 JANUARY

THE KANGRA VALLEY RAILWAY — INDIA'S BEAUTIFUL SECRET

The Line That Time Forgot

Ask most railway enthusiasts to name India's mountain railways and they will mention Darjeeling and Shimla immediately. Ask them about the Kangra Valley Railway and the answer is usually a pause and a slight frown. This is the great paradox of the line: it is, in many ways, the most beautiful of the three, and yet it remains the least known. It has no UNESCO inscription, no international marketing campaign, no queue of tourists at its platforms. It simply runs — as it has run since 1929 — through some of the loveliest scenery in the Himalayan foothills, largely unobserved by the world that would adore it if it knew.

The Kangra Valley Railway was built to connect the remote districts of Himachal Pradesh with the main line at Pathankot, opening up a valley that had been largely inaccessible to modern commerce. Its 164 kilometres run east to west through a landscape of extraordinary variety: rice paddies and wheat fields in the lower valley, forests of sal and deodar on the hillsides, and always, on the northern horizon, the Dhauladhar range — the 'White Mountain Range' — its high peaks snow-covered for most of the year, rising to over 4,500 metres in a wall of white that seems barely real against the blue sky.

The railway passes through a remarkable concentration of ancient religious sites. The Kangra Valley was one of the wealthiest kingdoms in the Himalayan foothills for centuries, its rulers patrons of a distinctive school of miniature painting that produced some of the finest art in Indian history — delicate, jewel-coloured works depicting scenes from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, now dispersed in museums from London to New York. The Brajeshwari Devi temple in Kangra town is one of the Shakti Peethas, among the holiest sites in the Hindu tradition, drawing pilgrims from across the subcontinent for over a thousand years.

A Landscape That Asks Nothing of You Except to Look

The journey from Pathankot to Joginder Nagar takes the better part of a day, and it is not a journey for those in a hurry. The train does not hurry either. It ambles through the valley at a pace that encourages the kind of sustained, unhurried looking that is increasingly rare in modern travel. Villages appear and disappear. Women in bright saris carry water jars along paths beside the track. Temple bells carry across rice paddies on the morning air. The Beas and Uhl rivers run jade-green alongside the line in places, their water coloured by glacial mineral content from the peaks above.

On clear days — and January in the Kangra Valley offers a significant number of them — the Dhauladhar peaks fill the northern windows of the carriage in a display so dramatic that passengers frequently fall silent. The range rises almost directly from the valley floor, without the gentle foothills that soften the approach to most Himalayan peaks, and the effect is of mountains that have simply decided to begin at your feet and continue upward without apology.

Dharamshala & McLeod Ganj — Little Lhasa

No visit to the Kangra Valley is complete without a day in Dharamshala and its upper township of McLeod Ganj — a place unlike anywhere else in India, or perhaps anywhere else in the world. Since 1960, when His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama fled Tibet following the Chinese annexation and established his government-in-exile here, the town has become simultaneously a Tibetan cultural capital in miniature and an international gathering point for those drawn to Tibetan Buddhism and the improbable quality of the place itself.

McLeod Ganj occupies a ridge at about 1,500 metres, with the Dhauladhar rising immediately behind it and the Kangra Valley spread out below. Its streets are a permanent, vivid collision of cultures: Tibetan monks in burgundy robes pass Israeli backpackers and Indian pilgrims; thangka painting workshops sit alongside Himalayan cafés serving apple cake and butter tea; the sound of monks debating in the courtyards of the Namgyal Monastery drifts over the noise of the market. The Namgyal Monastery is the Dalai Lama's personal monastery, transplanted from Lhasa, its rituals and ceremonies continuing exactly as they would have in Tibet before the exile — a living fragment of a culture that exists in its original context nowhere else on earth.

Chandigarh — Le Corbusier's Dream, Still Dreaming

The transition from the medieval religious landscape of the Kangra Valley to the rigorously modern geometry of Chandigarh is one of the expedition's most deliberate juxtapositions. Chandigarh was conceived in the early 1950s as the new capital of the Punjab, following Partition, which had left the old capital Lahore on the Pakistani side of the border. The Indian government commissioned Le Corbusier to design the city from scratch — the only time in the twentieth century that a major international architect was given a blank canvas of this scale to work with.

The result is a city unlike any other in India: a grid of broad, tree-lined boulevards dividing the city into numbered sectors, each containing its own market, school and park in a vision of rational urban order that still, seven decades later, functions more or less as intended.

But the most extraordinary thing in Chandigarh was not designed by Le Corbusier. The Rock Garden, built in secret over nearly two decades by a road inspector named Nek Chand using broken bangles, ceramic tiles, industrial waste and urban rubble, is an outsider-art installation of staggering scale — a labyrinthine sequence of walled courtyards, cascading waterfalls, and sculptures assembled from refuse. When the authorities discovered it in 1975, Chand had created an installation covering 40 acres. Instead of demolishing it, Chandigarh made him a municipal employee and charged him with continuing its expansion. It is now one of the most visited sites in India.

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PART THREE · 6 – 9 JANUARY

THE KALKA–SHIMLA RAILWAY — THE LINE THAT BUILT AN EMPIRE'S SUMMER

Built for the Raj — Surviving the Republic

By the 1890s, Shimla had been the summer capital of British India for over fifty years. Each spring, the entire apparatus of imperial government — the Viceroy, his council, senior civil servants and their families — migrated north from Calcutta or Delhi to this hill station at 2,200 metres in the Shivalik Hills, where the temperature was thirty degrees cooler than the plains below. The journey was made by road — slow, difficult and uncomfortable, consuming days of travel and several changes of conveyance.

The railway built between 1898 and 1903 to resolve this inconvenience was a feat of engineering audacity. The brief was simply stated: connect Kalka, on the main Delhi–Amritsar line, with Shimla, 96 kilometres away and 1,420 metres higher. The execution required 102 tunnels — one of them, at Barog, running for over a kilometre in a perfectly straight line through the heart of a mountain — 864 bridges and viaducts, and a track so sinuous that the actual distance travelled is nearly twice the straight-line distance between the two cities.

The engineer responsible for the Barog tunnel, Colonel Barog, miscalculated the alignment so badly that the two tunnel headings, driven from opposite ends simultaneously, failed to meet in the middle. The British authorities fined him one rupee — a nominal but humiliating penalty — and he subsequently shot himself. His grave is beside the tunnel entrance. His replacement completed the tunnel correctly. It remains the longest on the line, its darkness and perfect straightness giving the few seconds of daylight at its far end the quality of a revelation.

Shimla — the Summer Capital, Still Haunted by Empire

Shimla is the most Raj of all India's hill stations, and arriving there by the Kalka–Shimla Railway — exactly as its first passengers did in 1903 — is the only proper way to arrive. The town's mock-Tudor station opens onto a ridge so narrow that The Mall runs along its very crest, with the hillsides dropping sharply away on both sides, houses and hotels clinging to the slopes below like barnacles on a hull.

The Mall was the social heart of British India's summer season. Motor cars were banned from it — and still are, making it one of the few traffic-free main streets in any Indian city. Christ Church, at its eastern end, is the second-oldest church in North India. The Gaiety Theatre, built in 1887, hosted the amateur theatrical productions that entertained the administrators of empire through the long summer evenings — a tradition revived in recent years by the Shimla Amateur Dramatic Club, in continuous existence since the 1880s.

The Viceregal Lodge — now the Indian Institute of Advanced Study — stands on Observatory Hill above the town in the Scottish Baronial style, serving as the Viceroy's residence from 1888 to 1947. It was here that Mountbatten presided over the negotiations that produced Independence and Partition; here that Nehru and Jinnah met across the table in that final summer; here that the fate of several hundred million people was determined in rooms that still smell faintly of teak oil and empire.

Below the ridge, the bazaars of the lower town operate in a different register entirely — dense, noisy, colourful, selling hand-knitted Himachali woolens and fresh apples from the surrounding orchards. The contrast between the ordered Victorian promenade above and the organic chaos of the bazaar below is one of the most vivid illustrations of India's layered history available to the traveller.

Delhi — and a Parliament of Iron Horses

The expedition concludes at the Delhi Railway Museum, one of the finest railway collections in Asia. Broad-gauge Pacifics from the 1930s stand alongside narrow-gauge saddle tanks of the kind encountered on the DHR; early diesels beside Victorian steam; the imperial past beside the modern present. They stand in the open air like a parliament of iron horses — each one a chapter in the story that the preceding fourteen days has told.

It is, as a conclusion, both satisfying and deliberately incomplete. India's railway heritage is vast enough to sustain a lifetime of expeditions. The Delhi Railway Museum is an invitation as much as a conclusion. The journey ends. The next one begins forming in the mind.

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BOOK YOUR PLACE

The expedition runs 27 December – 9 January and may be booked as individual sections or as the complete 14-night journey. All prices include internal flights within India, private charter operations, accommodation, a dedicated UK Tour Manager, and a group tipping fund.

Darjeeling Himalayan Railway · 27 Dec – 1 Jan · 6 nights · £1,495 per person twin share · single supplement £375

Kangra Valley & Foothills · 2 – 5 Jan · 4 nights · £745 per person twin share · single supplement £195

Kalka–Shimla Railway · 6 – 9 Jan · 4 nights · £1,050 per person twin share · single supplement £225

Complete Grand Expedition · 27 Dec – 9 Jan · 14 nights · £2,999 per person twin share · single supplement £795

Places are limited. Charter operations and workshop visits are subject to final railway permissions and operational approval.

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