East Indian Railway Company

(Redirected from East India Railway) Railway company in British India

East Indian Railway

Map of the East Indian Railway, 1863.
Industry	Railways
Founded	1 June 1845 (1 June 1845)
Defunct	14 April 1952 (14 April 1952)
Headquarters	Calcutta, India
Area served	West Bengal, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh
Services	Rail transport

The East Indian Railway Company, operating as the East Indian Railway (reporting mark EIR), introduced railways to East India and North India, while the Companies such as the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, South Indian Railway, Bombay, Baroda and Central India Railway and the North-Western Railway operated in other parts of India. The company was established on 1 June 1845 in London by a deed of settlement with a capital of £4,000,000, largely raised in London.

1845–1849

The first board of directors formed in 1845 comprised thirteen members and Rowland Macdonald Stephenson became the first managing director of the company.

Rowland Macdonald Stephenson (later Sir Rowland, but familiarly known as Macdonald Stephenson) and three assistants travelled from England in 1845 and "with diligence and discretion" surveyed, statistically studied and costed the potential traffic for a railway route from Calcutta (the then commercial capital of India) to Delhi via Mirzapur. They assessed that the maximum cost of a twin-track line would not exceed £15000 per mile if the land was available without charge. The East Indian Railway Company was then formed and raised money in London. A contract was signed between the East India Company and the East Indian Railway Company on 17 August 1849, entitling the latter to construct and operate an "experimental" line between Calcutta and Rajmahal, 161 km (100 miles) long at an estimated cost of £1 million which would be later extended to Delhi via Mirzapur.

1850–1851

On 7 May 1850, the East Indian Railway Company's managing director Macdonald Stephenson, George Turnbull, the company's Chief Engineer, and the engineer Slater made an initial survey from Howrah (across the River Hooghly from Calcutta) to Burdwan on the route to the Raniganj coalfields. By June, there was an impasse, in that the government did not allow Turnbull and his engineers to mark a route on the ground. Specifications for works were however advertised on 1 July and tenders received on 31 July for six contracts. Bamboo towers 80 feet (24 m) tall were then built above the palm trees at Serampore and Balli Khal to set out the line.

1851–1853

On 29 January 1851 the East Indian Railway Company took possession of its first land. Turnbull and other British engineers began detailed surveys of the line. They chose the critical crossing point on the 5,000-foot-wide (1,500 m) Son River (the largest Ganges tributary) on 17 February. The best route to Raniganj was determined in May and June. The plans for Howrah station were submitted on 16 June.

Tenders for 11 contracts arrived on 31 October 1851. In December Turnbull continued his survey: he took levels and defined the line from Burdwan to Rajmahal.

Divisions

Divisions of East Indian Railway (1947-1952): Howrah, Asansol, Danapur, Allahabad, Moradabad and Sealdah (part of the Eastern Bengal Railway until 1942 and later the Bengal and Assam Railway until 1947, but added to the East Indian Railway during the Partition of India in 1947)

Infrastructure

All permanent way and rolling stock was transported from Britain in sailing ships to Calcutta via the Cape of Good Hope (the Suez Canal did not then exist). In April 1854, it was estimated that over 100,000 tons of rails, 27,000 tons of chairs, and some 8000 tons of keys, fish-plates, pins, nuts and bolts were needed.

Rolling stock

By 1859, there were 77 engines, 228 coaches and 848 freight wagons. By the end of 1877 the company owned 507 steam locomotives, 982 coaches and 6,701 goods wagons. In 1900 the wagon stock was under 14,000 wagons, in 1905 it was over 17,000 wagons.

In 1907 five steam railcar from Nasmyth, Wilson and Company was purchased.

Sleepers

Although immense quantities of sal tree wood for sleepers were delivered from Nepal, yet more were needed. So fir sleepers from the Baltic were creosoted in England and shipped to India.

Bridges

The initial plans were for the many bridges over the Ganges tributaries to be built of bricks: hundreds of millions were needed. Brick-making skills were very limited and often the available clay was found to be unsuitable. Transport by river of suitable clay was difficult. Brick availability became a major problem, so the decision was made to use vast quantities of ironwork – imported from England as India had no iron works at that time. Much ironwork was stolen during the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

Construction work of Old Yamuna Bridge in Delhi started in 1863 which was popularly known as lohe ka pool(bridge made by iron) and completed in 1866. It is a 12 spanned bridge. The construction cost of the bridge was Rs 16,16,335/- Initially it was made as a single railway track but was upgraded to double track in 1913.

1854–1863

Line openings

The 541 miles (871 kilometres) of line from Howrah to Benares were opened to:

Hooghly (37 km or 23 miles) for passenger traffic on 15 August 1854. More than 3000 applications were received from people wanting to ride in the first train in eastern India. The first train ran to full capacity. The train left Howrah station at 8:30 a.m. and reached Hooghly in 91 minutes. It had three first-class and two second-class coaches. It also had three trucks for third-class passengers and a brakevan for the guard. All of these were built in India, because the ship ferrying the original coaches from England had unfortunately met with natural disaster on the high seas and consequently sank. The locomotive however was imported, though not without its own difficulties. The ship bringing the locomotive had initially, due to an error, sailed to Australia, and the engine had to be shipped back to India.

During the first 16 weeks, the company was delighted to carry 109,634 passengers: 83,118 third class, 21,005 second class, and 5511 first class. The gross earnings, including the receipts of a few tons of merchandise were £6793.

Pundooah on 1 September 1854.
Burdwan in February 1855.
Raniganj with its coalfields on 3 February 1855. In 1855, 617,281 passengers were carried and contracts made to carry 100,000 tons of coal from the Raniganj colliery to Howrah.
Adjai in October 1858.
Rajmahal (on the River Ganges) in October 1859. The first train ran from Howrah to Rajmahal via Khana (now known as the Sahibganj Loop) on 4 July 1860. 1,388,714 passengers were carried in 1859.
Bhagalpur in 1861.
The loop from Khana Junction to Kiul via Jamalpur, including the Monghyr branch in February 1862. In the same year the line reached Mughal Sarai via the present line beyond Kiul. The sections from Luckee Sarai to Danapore and Danapore to Mughal Sarai were completed in the meantime.
Son River. George Turnbull inspected the Son bridge and judged it complete on 4 November 1862.
Across the River Ganges from Benares in December 1862.

Including branch lines this totalled 601 miles (967 kilometres).

Bridges, tunnel and cholera

The most significant bridge was the girder bridge over the Son River (then known in English as the Soane River) which at the time was understood to be the second longest in the world. Other significant bridges were the girder bridges over the Kiul and Hullohur rivers and the masonry bridge over the Adjai. The Monghyr tunnel was a challenge. In late 1859, a horrific cholera epidemic in the Rajmahal district killed some 4000 labourers and many of the British engineers.

Celebrations on completion

On 5 February 1863, a special train from Howrah took George Turnbull, the Viceroy Lord Elgin, Lt Governor Sir Cecil Beadon and others over two days to Benares inspecting the line on the way. They stopped the first night at Jamalpur near Monghyr. They alighted at the Son bridge and inspected it. In Benares there was a durbar on 7 February to celebrate the building of the railway and particularly the bridging of the Son river, the largest tributary of the Ganges.

The Chief Engineer responsible for all this construction from 1851 to 1862 was George Turnbull who was acclaimed in the Indian Official Gazette of 7 February 1863 paragraph 5 as the "First railway engineer of India".

Criticisms

Some historians like Irfan Habib argue that because the contracts signed between East India Company and EIR in 1849 guaranteed 5% return on all capital invested, initially there was no inducement for economy or for employing Indians instead of high-paid Europeans (but initially, there were only experienced British railway civil engineers and no Indian ones). EIR was stated in 1867 to have spent as much as Rs 300,000 on each mile of railway, the construction described by a former Finance Member in India as the most extravagant works ever undertaken.

Later 19th-century developments

The line from Kanpur to Allahabad was opened in 1859. In 1860, the Kanpur-Etawah section was opened to traffic, and between 1862 and 1866 all gaps between Howrah and Delhi were filled, and the connection to Agra built. The bridges over the Yamuna at Allahabad and at Delhi were completed in 1865 and 1866 respectively. In June 1867 the Allahabad-Jabalpur branch was completed and a connection made at Jabalpur with the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, thus completing the rail connections between Calcutta and Delhi and Calcutta and Bombay. On 31 December 1879, the British Indian Government purchased the East Indian Railway Company, but leased it back to the company to work under a contract terminable in 1919.

20th-century developments

On 1 January 1925 the British Indian Government took over the management of the East Indian Railway and divided it into six divisions: Howrah, Asansol, Danapur, Allahabad, Lucknow and Moradabad.

On 14 April 1952, Jawaharlal Nehru, the Prime Minister of India inaugurated two new zones of the first six zones of the Indian Railways. One of them, the Northern Railways had the three "up-stream" divisions of East Indian Railway: Allahabad, Lucknow and Moradabad, while the other, the Eastern Railways had the three "down-stream" divisions: Howrah, Asansol and Danapur and the complete Bengal Nagpur Railway.

Classification

It was labeled as a Class I railway according to Indian Railway Classification System of 1926.

External links

References

"Bangladepia". Archived from the original on 19 May 2011. Retrieved 27 January 2008.
^ Diaries of George Turnbull (Chief Engineer, East Indian Railway Company) held at the Centre of South Asian Studies at Cambridge University, England
Huddleston 1906, p. 2.
^ Rao 1988, p. 18.
Mukherjee 1995, pp. 136–137.
Huddleston 1906, p. 27.
Archiv für Post und Telegraphie, Band 7 (in German). Reichsdruckerei, Berlin. 1879. pp. 62–63.
Huddleston 1906, p. 181.
"EIR Steam Railway Motor Coach" (in German). Archived from the original on 26 April 2022. Retrieved 26 April 2022.
Mukherjee 1995, pp. 113–140.
^ "Old Yamuna Bridge, 1863-66". Archived from the original on 21 June 2018. Retrieved 21 June 2018.
"A bridge of stories". The Hindu. 19 June 2016. Archived from the original on 1 March 2020. Retrieved 21 June 2018.
"/136-year-old-bridge-on-the-yamuna-river-is-still-going-strong". 25 August 2003. Archived from the original on 21 June 2018. Retrieved 21 June 2018.
Rao 1988, pp. 18–19.
Huddleston 1906, p. 28.
^ Rao 1988, p. 19.
Huddleston 1906, p. 34.
Huddleston 1906, p. 25.
George Turnbull, C.E. 437-page memoirs published privately 1893, scanned copy held in the British Library, London on compact disk since 2007
Huddleston 1906, p. 35.
Habib 2006, pp. 36–37.
Rao 1988, p. 35.
Rao 1988, pp. 42–43.
"Indian Railway Classification". Archived from the original on 10 November 2022. Retrieved 10 November 2022.
World Survey of Foreign Railways. Transportation Division, Bureau of foreign and domestic commerce, Washington D.C. 1936. pp. 210–219. Archived from the original on 10 November 2022. Retrieved 10 November 2022.

Notes

Habib, Irfan (2006). A Peoples History of India Vol 28. Indian Economy 1858–1914. Aligarh: Tulika.
Huddleston, George (1906). History of the East Indian Railway. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Company.
Mukherjee, Hena (1995). The Early History of the East Indian Railway 1845–1879. Calcutta: Firma KLM. ISBN 81-7102-003-8.
Rao, M.A. (1988). Indian Railways. New Delhi: National Book Trust.

v t e Class I railways according to Indian Railway Classification System
Assam Bengal Railway Bengal and Assam Railway Bengal and North Western Railway Bengal Nagpur Railway Bikaner State Railway Bombay, Baroda and Central India Railway Burma Railways Eastern Bengal Railway Eastern Punjab Railway East Indian Railway Great Indian Peninsula Railway Jodhpur State Railway Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway Mysore State Railway Nizam's Guaranteed State Railway North Western State Railway Oudh and Tirhut Railway Rohilkund and Kumaon Railway South Indian Railway

Class I railways according to Indian Railway Classification System

Railways in Eastern India

National network/
trunk lines

Other lines/sections

Interstate	Asansol–Gaya section Asansol–Patna section Asansol–Tatanagar–Kharagpur line Barauni–Gorakhpur, Raxaul and Jainagar lines Barkakana–Son Nagar line Barsoi–New Farakka section Barsoi–Radhikapur branch line Dumka–Bhagalpur line Gaya–Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Junction section Hatia–Rourkela line Jasidih–Dumka–Rampurhat line Jharsuguda–Vizianagaram line Katihar–Siliguri line Kharagpur–Puri line Khurda Road–Visakhapatnam section Kothavalasa–Kirandul line New Jalpaiguri–Alipurduar–Samuktala Road line New Jalpaiguri–New Bongaigaon section Tatanagar–Bilaspur section
Bihar	Bakhtiyarpur–Tilaiya line Barauni–Katihar section Barauni–Samastipur section Fatuha–Tilaiya line Gaya–Kiul line Mokama–Barauni section Muzaffarpur–Gorakhpur line (via Hajipur, Raxaul and Sitamarhi) Muzaffarpur–Gorakhpur main line Muzaffarpur–Sitamarhi section Muzaffarpur–Hajipur section Narkatiaganj–Bhikhna Thori branch line Neora–Daniyawan–Bihar Sharif–Sheikhpura line Patna–Gaya line Patna–Mughalsarai section Patna–Sonepur–Hajipur section Raxaul–Sagauli line Samastipur–Muzaffarpur section
Jharkhand	Barkakana–Netaji S.C.Bose Gomoh line Barkakana–Muri–Chandil line Dhanbad–Chandrapura line Railways in Jharia Coalfield Koderma–Hazaribagh–Barkakana–Ranchi line Madhupur–Giridih–Koderma line Netaji S.C.Bose Gomoh–Hatia line
Odisha	Khurda Road–Bolangir line Cuttack–Sambalpur line
West Bengal	Ahmadpur–Katwa line Alipurduar–Bamanhat branch line Andal–Sainthia branch line Andal–Sitarampur loop line Bandel–Katwa line Bankura–Masagram line Bardhaman–Asansol section Bardhaman–Katwa line Barharwa–Azimganj–Katwa loop Darjeeling Himalayan Railway Eklakhi–Balurghat branch line Haldibari–New Jalpaiguri line Howrah–Barddhaman main line Howrah–Bardhaman chord Howrah–Kharagpur line Kharagpur–Bankura–Adra line New Mal–Changrabandha–New Cooch Behar line Santragachi–Amta branch line Sealdah Main and North section Calcutta Chord link line Kolkata Circular Railway Sealdah–Bangaon line Sealdah–Ranaghat–Gede line Ranaghat–Krishnanagar City–Lalgola line Sealdah South section Sheoraphuli–Bishnupur branch line

Suburban
rail transport

Monorail

Defunct lines

Revived/ Under revival	Ahmedpur–Katwa Railway Bankura–Damodar Railway Barasat–Basirhat Light Railway Burdwan–Katwa Railway Bakhtiarpur–Bihar Light Railway Futwah–Islampur Light Railway
Inactive	Bengal Provincial Railway East Coast State Railway Kalighat Falta Railway Mayurbhanj State Railway Dehri Rohtas Light Railway Patna–Digha Ghat line Parlakimedi Light Railway

Zones & Divisions

Eastern	Asansol Howrah Malda Sealdah
East Central	Danapur Dhanbad Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Samastipur Sonpur
East Coast	Sambalpur Khurda Road Waltair
North Eastern	Varanasi
Northeast Frontier	Katihar Alipurduar
South Eastern	Adra Chakradharpur Kharagpur Ranchi

Production units/
workshops

Transit points
with Bangladesh

Active	Haldibari–Chilahati Singhabad–Rohanpur Radhikapur–Biral Gede–Darshana Petrapole–Benapole
Defunct	Mahisasan–Shahbajpur Changrabandha–Burimari New Gitaldaha–Mogalhat

Indian railheads
near India–Nepal border

Railway companies

v t e Railways in Northern India
National network/ trunk lines	Howrah–Delhi main line New Delhi–Chennai main line New Delhi–Mumbai main line Howrah–Gaya–Delhi line Delhi–Jaipur line Jaipur–Ahmedabad line
Branch lines/ sections	Agra–Bhopal section Ahmedabad–Udaipur line Allahabad–Mau–Gorakhpur main line Ambala–Attari line Amritsar–Khem Karan line Amritsar–Pathankot line Aunrihar–Jaunpur line Barauni–Gorakhpur, Raxaul and Jainagar lines Bathinda–Rewari line Bathinda–Rajpura line Bikaner–Rewari line Bhanupli–Leh line Chandigarh–Sahnewal line Delhi–Fazilka line Delhi–Kalka line Delhi–Meerut–Saharanpur line Delhi–Moradabad line Jalandhar–Firozpur line Jalandhar–Jammu line Jammu–Baramulla line Jodhpur–Bathinda line Jodhpur–Jaisalmer line Kanpur–Delhi section Laksar–Dehradun line Lucknow–Gorakhpur line Lucknow–Moradabad line Ludhiana–Fazilka line Ludhiana–Jakhal line Marwar Junction–Munabao line Mathura–Vadodara section Mau–Ghazipur–Dildarnagar main line Merta Road–Rewari line Moradabad–Ambala line Mughalsarai–Kanpur section Rewari–Rohtak line Shri Ganganagar–Sadulpur line Suratgarh–Bathinda line Varanasi–Chhapra line Varanasi–Lucknow main line Varanasi–Rae Bareli–Lucknow line Varanasi–Sultanpur–Lucknow line
Urban and suburban rail transport	Delhi Suburban Railway Delhi Metro (Blue Green Grey Magenta Orange Pink Red Violet Yellow) Rapid Metro Gurgaon Lucknow–Kanpur Suburban Railway Barabanki–Lucknow Suburban Railway Delhi–Meerut RRTS
Heritage railways	Kalka–Shimla Railway
Monorails	Patiala State Monorail Trainways
Defunct lines	Jammu–Sialkot line
Manufacturing units and workshops	Banaras Locomotive Works Rail Coach Factory, Kapurthala Modern Coach Factory, Raebareli
Railway companies	Northern Railway North Eastern Railway North Central Railway North Western Railway East Indian Railway Company Kangra Valley Railway Rajputana–Malwa Railway Tirhut Railway Oudh and Tirhut Railway Indian Branch Railway Company Oudh and Rohilkhand Railway Cawnpore–Burhwal Railway Cawnpore–Barabanki Railway Lucknow–Bareilly Railway Bengal and North Western Railway Rohilkund and Kumaon Railway Mashrak–Thawe Extension Railway Lucknow–Sitapur–Seramow Provincial State Railway Bareilly–Pilibheet Provincial State Railway Segowlie–Raxaul Railway Delhi Metro Rail Corporation National Capital Region Transport Corporation
See also	Indian Railways Bholu (mascot) 1974 railway strike in India Haryana Orbital Rail Corridor