Kalka Mail

Railway Travel in the Raj

Author: 
Ken Staynor

Category:


Kenneth Hugh Staynor was  born at Madhupur on 16 September 1927. In 1929, his family went to the United Kingdom, and returned to India in 1931 to Kurseong, where his father was a teacher, and later Headmaster, at  Victoria School.  Kenneth was educated at St. Josephs College, Darjeeling, and St Mary's High School, Mount Abu. He left India in August 1951 for permanent residence in the UK to get into research and development in engineering, which was not available in India, and because his ancestral roots were in the UK. He lives in South Wales after retirement. His wife passed away in January 2010\; he has three sons, five grandsons, five granddaughters and one great granddaughter.

A journey by train has always been one of the great joys in my life, but the train journeys I made in India on the great railways of the Raj are the most enjoyable and memorable.

The memories of those journeys date back to August 1931, when as a young lad, arriving at Bombay from the UK, I made a journey of some one thousand two hundred miles from Victoria Terminus of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway  to  Dhanbad on the East Indian Railway, where my grandfather was the Yardmaster. Till then I was familiar only with the trains of the Southern Railway in England with their corridor trains and similar trains in Europe.

Subscribe to RSS - Kalka Mail