When India’s first commercial passenger train pulled out of Bori Bunder station in Bombay in 1853, it travelled only 34 kilometres in an hour and a half. Less than 50 years later, there were 41,000 km of railway lines across the country, administered by 33 different railway companies, only four of which were run by the state.

 

The government began to earnestly merge several private and public companies working in rail transport only after Independence. After 1905, a separate railway board was created.

 

But in 1921, the Acworth Committee recommended that railway finances be separated from Government finances. They should have their own profits & losses, the committee said and as a result first rail budget was presented in 1925.

 

 

And as Mumbai’s suburban railways hope that the central government will be kind to them in the budget – overhead bridges, functional toilets and reducing the alarming gap between platforms and trains top the list – these images, collected by train enthusiast and journalist Rajendra Aklekar from the Western Railway’s archive of photographs, depict Mumbai’s trains as they developed after Independence from just two tracks to a complicated system of trains.

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