East Indian Railway Company

By 1859, there were 77 engines, 228 coaches and 848 freight wagons.[6] By the end of 1877 the company owned 507 steam locomotives, 982 coaches and 6,701 goods wagons.[7] In 1900 the wagon stock was under 14,000 wagons, in 1905 it was over 17,000 wagons.[8]

In 1907 five steam railcar from Nasmyth, Wilson and Company was purchased.[9]

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.[2]

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.[10]

Construction work of Old Yamuna Bridge in Delhi started in 1863[11] which was popularly known as lohe ka pool(bridge made by iron)[12] and completed in 1866. It is a 12 spanned bridge. The construction cost of the bridge was Rs 16,16,335/-[11] Initially it was made as a single railway track but was upgraded to double track in 1913[13]

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.

Plaque at Howrah station for first train in Eastern India on 15 August 1854

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.[14]

• Pundooah on 1 September 1854.[4]
• Burdwan in February 1855.
• Raniganj with its coalfields on 3 February 1855.[4] 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.[15][16] 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.[16]
• 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.[17]

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

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.[18]

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.[19] They stopped the first night at Jamalpur near Monghyr. They alighted at the Son bridge and inspected it.[20] 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.[2]

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".

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.[21]