If you think you already know what the world’s greatest railway journey is, watch us put something even more spectacular than our incredible Indian odyssey together, it’s all in  The Great Circular European Railway Challenge.

And if you want to see what people who have just spent 2 weeks solid on Indian Railways on a journey that I was told categorically couldn’t be done without serious consequences, take a look at this great photo from Emily, who stayed on the train and kept going for another 5 days.

The Survivors

Most of the people on that photo, and everyone who got off in Goa earlier in the day, had never been on an Indian long distance back to back train trip before. Indeed, all the people missing from that photo had never even been in India before this trip!. So what are you waiting for ?

Charity

If you hadn’t worked it out yet, let me explain it just once again. I invited loads of people I’d never even met, including a bunch who had next to no idea what to expect,  on what was supposed to be a nightmare of a journey, as a dare to myself and my friends in order to blag money for an appropriate charity.  It took hundreds of hours to organize, much of it spent running dozens of discussion threads and communicating with scores of people who ultimately dropped out.  I built and ran software to analyze the behaviour and reliability of  the services we were using, and managed the booking for everyone . When we had to extend the pass dates due to an error on the part of myself (and Shankar and Steve in fairness) I bore the expense out of the free ticket I was due. Several other people with experience and knowledge you can’t easily buy, notably Steve on IndiaMike, also made significant contributions.

The total cost for anyone doing this would have been about £300. That was an astonishing figure even by Indian standards. Each and every person left the train with a rail-road story to trump anyone. The sum total raised for railway children appears to be about £4,267.44, or over 300,000 rupees. Extra special thanks to Stoy, and Laird and Lady Glenmuchkin, as well as Julian Galvin, and Bella, Andrew and Jason for sticking up their own pages, and absolutely everyone who stumped up a few quid, or a heck of a lot more in many cases.

If you have made any income from this trip, and have yet to make a donation despite being provided with such an incredible journey at such a fantastic price,  please rectify the situation.

Litter

I  wanted to write a letter to The Railways, ranting about the abysmal situation regarding litter.  It really is appalling, seemingly across the whole country. The shocking state of Darjeeling literally had me in tears at one point. It was always a bit of a dump, but it was at least a biodegradable one. As for the railways,the entire length of any mainline route is strewn with discarded plastic. Any line with Rajdhani trains is even worse.

I appeal to anyone visiting India, and it’s trains, to think before you stick your spent plastic in the vestibule waste bin. All that will happen to it is that it will get tossed out of the door by the train cleaner guy. If you don’t have a problem with that then you can stare at the rubbish strewn track-side with a sense of personal achievement that you’ve helped make all that happen. Or if the spectacle pisses you off as much as it does me then you can try and use tiffin boxes and keep your rubbish to yourself till you get off so that at least its got half a chance of making it to some kind of land fill.

Route Updates

Udhampur will, eventually, cease to be the northernmost point on the network. Once they link it up with the rest of the Kashmir railway you’ll be able to go all the way Baramulla. That’s not likely to happen for quite a few years though.

A more imminent threat to the integrity of the route that we did is a place called Naliya, north of the gulf of Kutch that splits Gujarat in two. There is a military line up there which is about to be opened for public use. When open it will beat Dwarka by about 5 miles. Note that as of now, the real most westerly  station is Varvala, between Dwarka and Okha, but only by about 100 yards and it really is a tiny halt.  We had an idea of getting a boat from Jamnagar to Gandhidam and keeping it more convex by not having to backtrack all the way to Ahmedabad. A more feasible method might be to go all the way to Okha and arrange a boat from there. Working this out in advance though isn’t going to be easy.

What Next ?

I’ve got two ridiculous railway projects on the boil. One is GCERC, a European version of this, as defined by the limits of a Eurail pass. We’ll be going from London to Narvik, Istanbul, Siracusa, Lisbon and back in 2 weeks. We’ll hit Narvik for summer solstice in 2013, have a full day in Istanbul, catch the spectacular Bernina Express across the alps, and have some kind of stop off at more than 20 of Europe’s greatest cities and capitals . The ticket alone for that wont give you much change out of £1,000, and we’ll be grabbing any reasonable luxury on offer when we can. No, you can’t come.

A great circular European railway

The other is a long weekend traversing every bridge and tunnel in New York City between islands and other islands or the mainland.  This is as good an excuse as any to eat loads of over sized sandwiches while riding around the biggest get lost city of them all, and I have enough to make up a foursome which is about as many as I can be bothered with. If you too think the only way you’ll be able to handle New York is by gyrating your way round the tube, rail, ferry and bus system for 72 hours (we will be sleeping beds fyi)  , plus a few walkways and footpaths, and are big enough that you don’t need me to hold your hand, i.e you can cook up your own route to do this, you are welcome to turn up at Grand Central on the same, as yet to be decided, day, and we’ll make it a challenge of some kind. We’ve called it Project Konigsberg.

Well, that’s all rubbish obviously. Nothing can save you if you get a serious attack of food poisoning, something that can happen anywhere in the tropics but perhaps nowhere more so than in India. If you can avoid that curse, wash regularly, and budget properly, then this really is quite a stylish and unforgettable way to travel. Everyone who followed the instructions that I posted on the costs page, specifically the one about bringing £150 to spend, which included all beer, taxis, food and hotels during the trip itself, strode off the train at Panvel thinking “is that it then ?,  I thought I’d be needing an ambulance”.

De-mob Happy. Lording it at Lord’s, Matheran

Of course we’ll have to see how the next people to attempt this get on before re-issuing the T-shirt as The Great Circular Indian Railway Jolly. The only previous entrant, a British clairvoyant, did it on his own, and in SL the whole way. It took him quite some time to recover from the feat. I estimate we spent half as much again as our test pilot (under £300 for everything instead of just over £200), did it 4 days quicker, covered much more ground and saw a whole lot more, and had a real ball doing it to boot. Perhaps the reason we did so well was the tedious planning, or may be it was sheer luck. But I think really it was because India’s railways run a damn site better than anyone seems to give them credit for. Just give yourself 6 hours between trains, none of ours was more than half an hour late!.  My stats, collected from the Indian Railways site trainenquiry.com over a period of 14 months, show that you’ll be unlucky to foul up if you stick to those guidelines (That’s perhaps a little simplistic. If you really do want to do this, and are big enough to understand that you probably need to talk to people about it first, go to IndiaMike and get some quality advice.  Some services can be appallingly late, there’s some science in working out which ones they are. You need to book the blinkin’ trains before you set off either way).

The Train is Your Sanctuary
Go AC2 the whole way, and bring someone you aren’t going to fall out with inside 2 days. As long as you are in a group of +1 so you aren’t worrying yourself daft the whole way round, it’s a totally do-able method. Wake up in a different place each day, do one or two activities, then get back to the station. You’ll end up wishing you had spent more time at certain places, but that’s all part of the idea. My principle aim was to get back home as quickly as possible, and as such the sight seeing was a side effect. Knowing what I now do, I’d have ditched Darjeeling, which was only in as a contingency 48 hours in case it all went mango shaped in Assam or before, and also because I wanted to go back and re-live a small moment of my youth. Instead I’d have focused more on arriving early in the morning, as we generally did, but leaving later in the afternoon. If we’d ignored Gorkhaland we could have included a whole day in Varanasi for instance, and also more time in Chennai, and still got back in the same time. I’ve got a timetable for that if you fancy doing the same 4 points plan with improvements.

Make Use Of Station Facilities
You need to take at least one buddy, particularly so that you can make extensive use of the upper class waiting rooms at the stations. These aren’t fancy airport style biz class waiting lounges or the like, more like a standard western class waiting room. But they have showers and you can find them at any major station and use them for free if you have a 2AC IndRail pass on you. All you need is a pal or two to look after the kit while you all rotate through the bathroom. The showers are usually free, though you may get stung for Rs20 (e.g Ahmedabad) but they really do work. As a result, we didn’t really need to rent hotel rooms for the purposes of washing after all. The main function of getting rooms was to give me some respite from the rest of the group. If you are in a more sensibly sized gang, say between 2 and 6, you don’t need to go for a hotel unless you are feeling a bit too buggered to spend all day doing an Indian city. And you can probably bag a retiring room at the station anyway. Obviously if you’ve been stupid enough to invite half the ruddy Internet to come round India with you then you aren’t all going to be able to get a railway retiring room. But you could always cheat and let everyone else check into somewhere then slip back to the station and bag a cheap room.

Amritsar Is A Must Do, As Is Ledo, But Udhampur Less So
We only stuck Amritsar in because of the way the timetable worked. If we hadn’t spent the day there then we’d have just had to waste a night in Jammu anyway. As it turned out it was a master stroke. You need to road it from Makhu in order to get both Wagah and the temple in. The border ceremony was an absolute hoot and I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it. The Golden Temple is truly divine, easily the most serene experience of the whole trip. Hat’s off, or on I guess, to the Sikhs . There’s also no problem staying in the pilgrim hostels at the temple, so if you are looking to stick in a night off the train this is an ideal option.

Udhampur certainly needs more work. The pre-arranged hotel I took there was a disaster and on the general subject of hotels, as I’ve said above, it’s just not needed. I made my life a mess for the first half of the trip because of this. Even if you do end up with a silly sized group, not something I’d recommend, just make it plain that it’s every soul for themselves once the train stops. My advice for Udhampur would be to just jump in a cab and drive straight back down to Jammu and keep going.

Ledo though, which I was expecting to be virtually tribal country, was brilliant. If you are looking at the map and thinking “do we really need to go all the way out there, and then come straight back” my advice is a definite “yes you do”. What you must do is visit the colliery. They are delightful people there and will be ever so glad to see you. There is no specific tourist policy, and no one even gave the suggestion that we should make a contribution. But please don’t take the Micky if you do make a visit. Go and see the boss and give him a dollar per head. The second thing is to perhaps to go to Singpho Eco lodge. Their meal is slightly pricey, but given the pace that you’d be doing the whole trip if you attempt anything like this, it’s more than worth it. You’ll then need to get a taxi back up to Tinsukia. What we should have done is get a taxi to do the whole of the days road traveling, rather than over load rickshaws. If I hadn’t been trying to accommodate a range of budgets then that’s what we’d have done.

Dont Start From Mumbai, Or If You Do Then Use Matheran
I’m still waiting to be re-united with footage from Matheran, but this litter free retreat is a real find. It will cost you barely any more to get a cab straight to this hill station just 60 km from the airport than it will to downtown Mumbai, and a fraction of what it costs to sleep there instead of Colaba. It also has a world class train ride up and down, which is really the only way to do it. If you are landing in India for the first time you could do much worse than make a beeline for this place while you find your bearings.
You still need to do Mumbai if you start from elsewhere, otherwise you’ll be cheating. But make sure you just do it in a day if you are on any kind of budget.

One Rajdhani is Probably Enough
Everyone thought that the Rajdhani we got out of New Delhi was the best thing that had ever happened to them. But the novelty wears off pretty quickly. The reasons for not doing perhaps anymore than 1 Rajdhani are

1. They don’t stop much, and when they do it’s for seconds and so you can’t go more than a few feet from the train. The stops that you get on a standard express are essential parts of the whole experience.
2. The meals are the same, both lunch and dinner. As a result you are missing out on an important aspect of the trip. The platform food available in most major stations is excellent. I can personally recommend Comesum. Just go for the flashest outlet you can see. If you want to avoid littering the country you’ve come to see (I’ve got a mega rant coming about the whole litter subject) then get yourself a tiffin and ask them to fill it up for you.
3. Your food packaging, and there’s tons of it, just gets thrown out of the train, see above point and the diatribe I am about to unleash about the behaviour of Indian Railways with respect to litter.
4. You get stung for tips, and the staff can be outrageously rude if you don’t give them +Rs100. So you aren’t making on the deal anyway (meals are free on Rajdhanis FYI). I doubt natives give more than Rs 20 a head, but as a tourist you could get some agro if it’s your first time in India. One of our India virgins had her Rs 50 thrown back in her face.
5. Free tea doesn’t really make up for the losses I’ve just listed. Part of the whole gig is the guy calling “chai chai chai chai”, “cold drink cold drink cold drink” etc etc. if I were doing this again I’d do no more than 1 Raj.

You can though still open the doors while in transit, contrary to one claim. They are cleaner than a standard 2AC express, and some of them are brand new and quite flashy.  If you are feeling like you’ve just had enough Hindustan for one lifetime, a feeling we all get, usually at least once a trip, then it’s an option for sure. But don’t over do it.

Some Advice If You Are  Doing This To Raise Money
If you are doing anything like this, don’t be shy, tell the participants what you are expecting. Be explicit. Professional charity expedition outfits stipulate a figure. There’s a reason for that. Obviously that’s going to put a bit more pressure on yourself as people will naturally expect you to be providing a service.

I needed an excuse to allow me to do this. I’ve never denied that. So my plan was, “invite anyone and everyone you can find to do this, including budget backpacking India first timers, and hope everyone plays fair and contributes to my once in a life-time charity sponge”. Organising this was not only a thoroughly worthwhile experience for me, but was also great for Railway Children on a number of levels. The group were  charming, knowledgeable, and very appreciative on a daily basis for how much work had gone into making this happen, before and during the trip, and by a whole group of people. and all with barely a hitch.

If that hasn’t sunk in yet, the link to the donations page is still waiting patiently at the top of the margin ….

This is the first of a series of these, I’m sure. In fact I know.

And while I am on, extra special thanks to Stoycho’s fiends Ivan and Mila and also David Young. I’ve got some accounting to do now for the Thanks page but the fund raising is coming along nicely.

Have  a groovy day if you missed Red Nose Day – GCIRC Virgin Money Giving page

GCIRC Day 3 – Riding the rails
I mistakenly thought that our first train, a 19 hour ride up to Dwarka, was our longest trip in the circuit. I was wrong though, there are at least two longer rides, and today I was on one of them – a 24 hour slog from Ahmedabad Jn. to Makhu. (5 actually)
http://drewgilbert.com/riding-the-rails/

GCIRC Day 4 – The one where Drew craps his brains out
Drew is, um, unavailable for today’s post, so he’s left it to his wife (Christine) to finish his update for him….

GCIRC Day 4 pt 2 – Delhi Belly: Just another statistic, man.
The lesson here, kids, is to come prepared better than I was. I was cocky. I was positive I wouldn’t need any sort of drugs to help me in a pinch, and as a result, I was at the mercy of my co-riders willingness to dip into their own resources to help me….
http://drewgilbert.com/delhi-belly-just-another-statistic-man/

GCIRC Day 5 – Udhampur: computing, party crashing, getting thrown off a train, etc
If it wasnt for John, at the very least you would have lost Assam, and spent the other side of 50 dollars catching up. I reckon that makes him your hero
http://drewgilbert.com/udhampur-computing-party-crashing-getting-thrown-off-a-train-etc/

GCIRC Day 6 – New Delhi: not so scary after all
I’ve also bought another package of baby wipes. The first batch suited me well, so I will continue with those…..
http://drewgilbert.com/gcirc-day-6-new-delhi-not-so-scary-after-all/

GCIRC Day 7 – I love this train
Writing this on the New Delhi – Dibrugarh Rajdhani, or The Rajdhani Express- my favorite train of the trip so far……
http://drewgilbert.com/gcirc-day-7-i-love-this-train/

GCIRC Day 8: I hate Assam. I love Assam.
I promise to read at least some of Mark’s instructions about the trip, and in particular stuff about Internet connectivity, if I am ever lucky enough to be invited on another of these events
http://drewgilbert.com/gcirc-day-8-i-hate-assam-i-love-assam/

GCIRC Days 9-11: Darjeeling – Welcome to Gorkhaland
We have reached the half way point of our little jaunt around India, and with two days in Darjeeling, everyone is meant to rest up and recharge their batteries. Whether or not that worked out as planned, you would have to ask the others, but from my point of view, everyone seems to have lost a bit of that early pep that we had at the beginning of this trip…..
http://drewgilbert.com/gcirc-days-9-11-darjeeling-welcome-to-gorkhaland/

GCIRC Day 12: Kolkata, and the art of passive travel
If you are going to be the passive traveler, you do not get to complain about where you travel…….
http://drewgilbert.com/gcirc-day-12-kolkata-and-the-art-of-passive-travel/

GCIRC Day 14: Rameswaram, elephants in Hindu temples and getting drunk

Who ate all the samosas?

http://drewgilbert.com/cgirc-day-14-rameswaram-elephants-in-hindu-temples-and-getting-drunk/

GCIRC Day 16: The Finale.
I would like to thank Mark for organizing this trip, something that I will remember for the rest of my life.
http://drewgilbert.com/gcirc-day-16-the-finale/

Most of Drew’s posts can be found in his The Great Circular Indian Railway Challenge archive here
http://drewgilbert.com/category/the-great-circular-indian-railway-challenge/

We did it! And it really was an epic adventure that only cost a couple of hundred dollars.

The Great Circular Indian Railway Challenge was never meant to be a relaxing tour. People often asked why we were in such a rush, why we didn’t take more time, and why we planned to spend so much time on trains.

The simple answer is that it was a challenge. But more than that, it was a chance to see some of the most remote parts of India through the lens of train travel in a timeframe that allowed an eclectic group to skip their homely commitments to do it together.

Steven, GCIRC Chief Technical Officer

read Todd’s full post here

Kaniyakumari

4:45 Am start on the last day, 45 extra sacred running delay minutes in the sanctuary of the train before the final day. The train obviously gets in at that time in order that pilgrims can get to the cape proper in time for the sun rise. The day break was nothing spectacular alas due to distant cloud, but there were so many Indians there that it was an event non the less.

Rickshaws then for the 20km or so up to Nagercoil Junction, traveling in the comparative luxury of 2 and 3 to a rickshaw, with myself in my customary shotgun position next to the driver, which at least might allow me to leap from the vehicle should head on collision occur.

I am still fathoming how you can get 6 adults with luggage, 3 Australians, 2 Americans and a substantial Indian, plus driver, in a standard 2 seater rickshaw. Please don’t try this at home. I’ve already discussed the casualty rate on Indian roads.

Then a local passenger train up to Trivandrum, which was entertaining. We missed the chance though to cut out Trvandrum by getting off at  Balaramapuram, which looked an interesting place. Then into a nice ambassador taxi to the beach, with the usual 6 in a rickshaw brigade following behind and failing to take any hints.

Kovalam was at first sight totally unrecognizable, but it turned out that the original little cottages are still there under the lighthouse. I couldnt remember exactly which one I stayed in, but you can, with a little effort, imagine what the place looked like 29 years ago if you just blot out absolutely everything else bar the lighthouse. It was quite a nostalgic moment for both John and I. It’s now a rather crowded beach resort. God only knows what it must be like at Christmas these days.

The highlight of the day though, by a country mile, was the state run coffee house outside the station. It’s worth coming to Trivandrum just to eat in that incredible building. It’s a spiraled construction made of brick. The building has it’s own fantastic termite mound style natural AC system by by way of the triangular “window” holes allowing breeze to run through and I guess circulate up the spiral building. The drinks are great, we really should have arranged to spend more time here though.

The Coffee House at Trivandrum Station, by Kothanda

Many thanks to Steven in particular for helping out especially with many of the imaginative ideas. It’s a shame we never got to do Dhemaji, but then just one night in Darjeeling would have caused a mutiny I feel sure.
I lost my temper quite a few times, so nothing new there. Apologies those who got the thick end.
If my wife and family, who I now miss very much, ever let me do anything like this again, it will be back to the usual 4 blokes.

Trying to get online up the Konkan is actually a nightmare, it takes about five minutes to get online, the a tunnel comes and you have to start again. John, Jason and I will be the only ones to make it up the hill at night at Matheran.

Expect a micro post in a few hours declaring the completion of the main rail route at Panvel, but after that I need to take a break from this for a few days and work out what we ended up with and what state my head is in.

And for the record, Der Führer means, literally, The Guide.