The Indian Railways is definitely an interesting organization.
Doing a cursory glance at a Wikipedia entry, some of the stats:
1. Established in 1832
2. 3rd largest railway network in the world
3. 8th largest employer in the world.
I was hoping to see something about the actual Rail Track details but this is more of a civil engineering specs for building construction.
I am curious about when and how Indian Railways will incorporate high speed rail such as the French TGV, Japanese Shinkansen or Chinese CRH.
On a visit to China in 2017 and taking a short trip in the Chinese CRH, I heard stats about 2,000 high speed trains a day. It was an interesting experience traveling at speeds greater than 300 kmh and not feeling a thing.
Of course I am curious about when the USA will incorporate the same.
Indian Railways is a state owned enterprise - a very large one. Until recently, India's central government released two annual financial statements (budgets) each year: one for railways, and the second for everything else.
> when and how Indian Railways will incorporate high speed rail
So there are two parallel efforts going on.
High speed bullet trains[1]. These require building everything from scratch, tracks, stations and so on. When fully operational, it will be a truly new experience for Indians and hope will boost economy and benefit common man.
The second one[2] is upgrading existing tracks and coaches to be run at a higher speed (I guess around ~150KM/h). This will also have an added benefit of upgrading existing infrastructure such as signalling, crossings, tracks etc., Given the sheer size and complexity of Indian Railways IMO this will have more benefits as it'll improve the overall running times, utilisation and such.
Indian Railways is a life line of millions of people as they rely on it for daily wages. And as far as complex systems to very few come close to it. Until very recently they still relied on manual token exchange mechanism[3]. During one of train station visits my father drew my attention to token exchange and explained how it worked. Truly awesome.
I'm glad to see it on the front page of HN; more people need to know about it.
I can understand why you might need new tracks for bullet trains (old ones not perfectly level and aligned, quality of materials, friction properties, whatever).
But why would you have to build new _stations_ for them?
You need new tracks as in completely different right of way. Bullet trains need very straight tracks, existing tracks are too curved and at high speeds you'd fly off in the corners (tilting trains exist but have limitations). And if you're building new track, there are no existing stations to reuse.
Generally, when you go the high-speed route, you have lines that are a lot longer than slower, more local lines. You do not want stations along the way to be terminus-style stations, where you'd
1. have to switch out the driver position from one end of the train to another end to just leave the station again and
2. have a series of track switches which may malfunction (which ironically is a challenge even for highly industrialised countries like Germany), and it
3. means more and slower track to be maintained.
If you set up a bullet train program, you want speed, and these problems kill the speed advantage. The solution is to build a new station in which the train can just pass through.
Indeed! I am sure I missed quite a few high speed systems.
India is in the shape of a diamond, where the most populous cities would be at the four points of the diamond aligned North-South. A high speed train network that would cover Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai together as a fully connected graph will probably have the highest volume of traffic. [1]
A trip from Trivandrum, Kerala or Kanya Kumari, Tamil Nadu in the South of India to the stations in Assam or Arunachal Pradesh in the North East of India would be some of the longest trips that you can take.
India has also some of the most beautiful railway lines in the world with switchbacks connecting the plains to the hill stations. [2]
Also some of the most expensive train rides. [3]
Of course there's air travel for the time conscious but the trains are for the adventurous travelers.
BTW, One of the most interesting stays I had in the US was at the Chattanooga Choo Choo in Chattanooga, TN. [4]
I found the focus on first class passengers quite interesting. There are guidelines along the lines of "no provision to be made of toilets if there are no first class passengers", "make sure to have separate waiting rooms for different classes of passengers"..
The British era recommendations hadn't been removed by 1967 at least.
> but long travel rails always do no matter what class you use
Same in India. I was referring to the other perks that the GP post mentioned. I cannot find the reference to 'only first class passengers get toilets' in the document. In fact the phrase 'first class' itself has zero hits, there's one hit for 'upper class' which is unrelated. Perhaps they meant toilets adjacent to waiting rooms for first class at the station so they don't have to walk to the general ones.
The word "caste" is derived from the Portuguese castas.
The European class system is essentially what transformed into the Indian caste system.
Not to mean there was no social hierarchy in India, but the rigid birth based system we have today is the handiwork of the British social engineering.
Especially interesting is the population survey which labeled population with a caste, the power to label someone X lay with the enumerator rather than the person being enumerated self identifying with a caste.
>Not to mean there was no social hierarchy in India, but the rigid birth based system we have today is the handiwork of the British social engineering.
That is not true. Caste endogamy goes back a long ways[1] before the Brits.
That's pretty broad conclusions for Razib Khan to be drawing from scant (and biased) data. (The population of Indians in the United States in a non-random sampling of the Indian genome, especially since our immigration policy is largely selected on the basis on already having family networks based in the US. I would expect to see a lot more clustering than in an Indian sampling).
The gist of it is that there are a lot of discrete, endogamous subgroups within India formed by successive waves of migration by different groups to where they are functionally distinct ethnic populations. So it wouldn't be all that different from racial differences in a plural society like the United States. What's remarkable is the maintenance of this plurality, as well as in-group social norms, over a very long span of time rather than it becoming a genetic melting pot as we might have expected from experiences with Europe. But even there you still have distinct groups with strong endogamy norms (e.g. Ashkenazi Jews).
There's also additional complexity because in many places there isn't just a norm of endogamy, but consanguinity (cousin-marriage). Which is certainly going to make groups look more endogamous even though it would lead us to draw subtly different conclusions about what that means in terms of historic cultural norms.
TL;DR it's a really complicated matter that doesn't lend itself to summarization into a single, clean, generalizable narrative.
This is not true. caste is the foundation of the vedic. Its the division of labour not laboreres. For the scientific minided with verifable facts read the short manual by an actual scientist and later political reformer https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/readin...
The person you’re replying to has a history of denying known issues with Indian society and blaming the britishers and/or Islamic invaders like the Mughals for all of India’s issues. I tangled with them not so long ago. Wasn’t worth the effort, imho.
With Mughals its whole different story. Instead of discouraging religion, some emperors tried to solve by marrying Hindu women. But their kids has to belong to one of the Koran or Vedic shit. It did not solve either anything. Now both of you go downvote me.
The British Raj furthered this development, making rigid caste organisation a central mechanism of administration. Between 1860 and 1920, the British formulated the caste system into their system of governance, granting administrative jobs and senior appointments only to Christians and people belonging to certain castes.
Caste systems had been operating in Europe as well [1]. But for the embracement, formalization and expansion of the caste system by the British it may have died down as it did elsewhere.
There is a crucial difference. If you become a great inventor or by luck if one becomes wealthy, one can move over the class system with the British system. Its not the case with the indian caste system, it is all about privilege by birth.
Varna is decided by karma, not birth. Dalits can and do become brahmins by following diets, rituals and become temple priests. Brahmins also have become kshatriyas by picking up weapons of war.
Vedic scriptures is very clear (rig veda) and prohibits any move. Even "Richard Stallman" (RMS) understands this https://stallman.org/articles/ramayana.html which native indian people act like they don't understand. I can site recent and better example that happened in TamilNadu (https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/tamil-nadu-dmk-temples...). 120 or so priests were appointed who were not from priest families. This is not allowed by the vedas(the hindu book). It is because government intervened and fought against the temples decisions. There is some progressive things happening in these states. Thanks to Periyar.
You are proving my point. The fact that there was no murderous mobs rampaging against the TN government move should tell you majority's support for reforms. Compare that to a SC killed in Delhi for allegedly "disrespecting the holy book", or the Bangladesh riots for the same reason a few days ago.
For what seems to be a fairly organized system, they still have not figured out how to not have the compartments smell like stale urine. I am not even joking. The moment you step into a compartment even the air-conditioned ones, the stench of urine is unbelievably strong. This has been this way since 2000s. Such a shame for a system that could be so much better.
Could be a hangover from British Imperialism, somehow the Pendolino’s in Britain manage to smell slightly of urine as well. It must be something to do with poor aerodynamics around the vent openings for the AC and the soil vent for the toilet tanks as they’ve never managed to fix it.
I went on one two weeks back. Nothing has changed my dude. And my seat was not even close to the toilets and it smelled like everyone was peeing solid yellow concentrated blocks. You can't make this up. I really wish they'd improve cos trains are super convenient.
It maybe went from worse to bad. I'll give you that but it is nowhere near normal.
Trains fares are very low in India. For example you can travel by a sleeper coach from Hyderabad to Chennai (628km) for just $5.38.
Unfortunately the low cost reflects in the poor quality of service.
The train fares are not intended to reflect costs; it is a public (well, state) enterprise funded via taxes by the overall economic activity of Indian society.
Which is to say that the quality of service is the result of political decisions at the social level rather than the fares. The fares could well have been 0 with great service, or much higher with the same poor quality.
The rules on page 32 for calculating the appropriate number of water closets are very interesting. I wonder how they came up with rates for many is required per person.
Indian Railways was started by the colonial British for just two purposes.
1. To Return multiple times returns for British investors on the expense of Indian colonies.
2. To move supply of Raw material to the ports and manufactured goods from England to the natives.
The British left India. But the Indian Railways is still in India.
This organization was not built to serve the people of the land. The Indians have improved it, despite being ruled by socialist governments for 70 years after independence.
Regarding 'helped unify India as a nation', they are not the first. Referring to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN41DJLQmPk, India's map looked close to the present day multiple times in the past.
Maurya Empire-284 BCE [1:57]
Delhi Sultanate (Tughlaq)-1345 [8:45]
Mughal Empire-1692 [10:24]
As for 'they also brought manufactured goods back', they exported raw materials from India and imported back finished goods, thereby destroying the local industries in India.
>By the mid-19th century, the Indian economy had been fully transformed into a colonial trade pattern, where its export consisted mainly of agricultural commodities such as foodgrains, and the home charges were met by exporting such commodities, while the imports consisted of manufactured goods, especially cotton textiles and machinery (Siddiqui, 2015c). After the 1880s, the trade imports became more diversified, due to the growing penetration of foreign manufactured goods such as cotton textiles, capital goods, machinery etc. (Siddiqui, 1996) This in turn further undermined the position of the local producers and hastened the decay of indigenous industries and handicrafts.
Perhaps it was posted here because it seems to have a remarkably broad scope going well beyond what might be considered railway-related? Just guessing, not the OP.
I am curious though, what part of the title indicated to you that there was something humorous in it?
This was the pattern I read in the title: "[Country] [Government org] Works Manual".
Surely, I thought to myself, the only reason this would have made it to the HN front page is if there were a few guffaws in it related to how asinine a government document could be, but I couldn't find anything in there that indicated the same.
Doing a cursory glance at a Wikipedia entry, some of the stats:
1. Established in 1832
2. 3rd largest railway network in the world
3. 8th largest employer in the world.
I was hoping to see something about the actual Rail Track details but this is more of a civil engineering specs for building construction.
I am curious about when and how Indian Railways will incorporate high speed rail such as the French TGV, Japanese Shinkansen or Chinese CRH.
On a visit to China in 2017 and taking a short trip in the Chinese CRH, I heard stats about 2,000 high speed trains a day. It was an interesting experience traveling at speeds greater than 300 kmh and not feeling a thing.
Of course I am curious about when the USA will incorporate the same.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Railways