Tales of Train Travel

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After a 24-hour long train ride from Varanasi to Bhubaneswar, I feel inclined to write about a few of the hilarities and bizarre occurrences of the trains and train stations here in India!

For starters, just a little description of the train system. First, booking a ticket is really a cloudy process. There are “travel agents” on pretty much every corner, but after using one of these a few times early on, we quickly discovered that the extra three dollars or so that you pay one of these travel agents is silly because they just log onto the internet and book the reservation for you. One time I was working with an agent who essentially turned the screen to me and told me to type in my details on the website, press purchase, and then press print and oh yea, then pay her for her work! So, logically we figured we’d go ahead and surf the net for our tickets. Well this is interesting because no where does it really tell you all of the trains, when they leave, how much they cost, and also let you book on the same site. There are hundreds of sites with ideas about this. There are people who have taken a particular train and written about it so when you search, these things come up, but the information is not centrally recorded at any reliable source and the site where you actually book your ticket only allows you to put in the exact train number, date, and departure/destination information and if you don’t have the tens of hundreds of train routes and numbers memorized, this can be quite a confusing and hopeless process. There is a book about the trains sold at some street stands, but even this book is huge and confusing!

The best thing we’ve found is to go to the train station and talk to an agent and book your train there. This way you don’t have to pay the booking fee and you can just tell them where and when you want to go and then they will pretty much do everything for you and just give you the ticket. This does have one added hassle and life-threatening hazard though which is that you have to take a rickshaw to the train station! For some reason the rides to and from the train station are the most wild and seemingly near death experiences, like the recent ride I had in Varanasi! I was with a new friend Sarah and her and I both actually screamed “Stop” at one point!

So anyway, if you are lucky enough to get a ticket and actually arrive at the station, then there are the waiting areas at the station and the boards telling you where and when trains arrive. Now every train is late. In fact, while there isn’t a central internet database for the train info, there is one site I came across that tells you on average how late each train usually is! Not a very good track record, but at least it’s consistent, so whenever you get to the train station you can pretty much be assured you’ll have to wait. There are some food and book stands usually, but mostly no matter if you arrive at four in the afternoon or four in the morning, there are tons and tons of people! Seriously, every time I’ve gotten to a station it is packed, no matter the hour or the station. So with all of these people and all of this waiting, the railways have very brilliantly created waiting rooms in all of the stations. But all of these waiting rooms are just empty concrete rooms with people just sitting and lying on the floor! By now if you’ve been reading the other posts on this blog, I’m sure you are very aware of the gross things that are always on the floors here and frankly they just aren’t places I would lay myself down on and wait for hours on end. There are about six benches per station on average I’d say, but sometimes those benches have been used as toilet areas for some reason and so a few times I’ve seen piles of poop around them deterring (some) people from even using them.

So then eventually you’re train comes. Most of the time I’ve been able to find the train, the number, and the platform it will leave from on the rotating boards in the main rooms…most of the time. But once it arrives, late, everyone pushes and shoves and rushes and jumps to get on the train as it approaches. It seriously doesn’t even stop before four or five men are pushing through the doors as though the train really might not stop at all! And then, once the train does stop, it sits there for fifteen minutes or so…every. single. time. Yep, every stop we go to, we wait at and not just for 2 seconds, but at least a few minutes throughout the whole journey and especially at big stations, yet still, all the passengers push and shove to get aboard so quickly! It is truly baffling to me as to why they do this and actually quite funny to watch if you aren’t brave enough to fight to be the first one on board! It is amazing too, because finding the car you want to get on can be quite the challenge. Often the tickets are printed very fainly so reading them can even be difficult and if the ticket is ripped or torn in any way, you might have a rough time getting the conductor to accept it! But anyway to find the car you are in, just walk up and down along the platform looking for that number. There is usually no order to the numbers on the trains and certainly no connection to the numbers on the platform so you just have to walk back and forth until you find it. Luckily there are usually numbers on the individual seats so you can find your spot once in the car and lock up your bags and sit. And wait. Again.

Ok so you have a ticket, you’ve made it to the station, you’ve waited, you’ve found your train, and you’ve even managed to get on board. Great, right? Well now comes the excruciatingly long journey!! The trains are arranged by class but the one we’ve taken so far is sleeper class. It is organized so there are three berths- upper, middle, and lower. At night all of the beds are properly pulled out and everyone sleeps (and snores). During the day the middle one collapses and the middle (and sometimes the upper) sleeper sits on the lower berth bed. So the lower and middle berths kind of suck because you don’t have the choice to sleep or sit or to make sure no one else sits by- which can be a very important thing sometimes!

Now throughout the whole ride, however many hours you are lucky enough to be aboard the train, there will be people walking through selling things. All kinds of things. There are the chai-wallas, people walking through with steaming hot kettles and cups calling “chai-ya chai-ya” kind of like a beer man at a baseball game. The chai-wallas come all throughout about every five minutes or so. There are similar wallas for all kinds of food from samoas to bananas to peanuts to candy...you name it. Then are the salesman that get on at each of the stations selling other stuff. I’ve been asked to buy books, magazines, and whistles. I’ve been asked to give money to blind people, prostitutes, men scooting along on wheel board with leg problems, and even obvious trans-gendered Indian people!

With all of this the trains are obviously loud and busy, and with all of these products you can buy, you can imagine there are chai cups and peanut shells and tobacco spit and human waste to dispose of. Well all of this goes on the tracks…yep all of straight out the window (or toilets) onto the tracks! It has actually been one of the hardest things to adjust to here…there just aren’t trash cans. There aren’t trash cans anywhere and the only thing to do is to toss your garbage on the ground! Ugh it is so hard to even think about. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do it with the ease an Indian can and I always save all my trash in a bag and set it next to other trash somewhere, which I guess ultimately ends up in the same place! The bathrooms are really downright disgusting too, but that will be a story for another time!

So that is the intricate web of train travel here in India as I’ve experienced it! While chaotic and messy, the train system here is amazing in that you can truly get anywhere in the entire county on a train. You can go from North to South, East to West and eventually arrive at your destination. This is wonderful and amazing to me because India is HUGE! If I’ve learned anything being here it is that. Seriously, it is one country but it is so big and diverse- and all connected by trains! What an inspiration for mass transportation! If India can do it…

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