The Iron Path Renewed: Indian Railways’ Evolution from Post-Partition Trauma to Digital Mastery

Part 2: of our three-part series on the making of Indian Railways traces the journey from national trauma to technological ambition.

The Chittaranjan Locomotive Works was the precursor to today’s ‘Make in India’ initiative.

A packed refugee train during Partition of Punjab, 1947.

Few institutions in the Republic have absorbed India’s shocks and ambitions with the stoicism of its railways. Born of an unlikely colonial wager, the Indian Railways’ modern story is one of reinvention across the turbulent arc from Partition’s upheaval to the dawn of a digital age. These years transformed the railways from a wounded inheritance of Empire into a sprawling industrial leviathan.

The story began with loss as Partition cleaved not just a subcontinent, but the tracks beneath it. Nearly 40 percent of the pre-Partition railway system passed to Pakistan, along with critical junctions, rolling stock and workshops. Lines were severed overnight; timetables were upended and logistical arteries snipped in ways that threatened to paralyse a country already staggering under the largest mass migration in human history. Before 1947, British India boasted around 17,000 km of track. After Partition, newly independent India inherited scarcely 10,000 km of usable lines.

Yet the greater rupture was emotional. The railways became the most visceral witness to India’s division. Refugee trains packed to their roofs, bearing families with nothing but bundles and memories, turned stations into theatres of grief. The network that once ferried ideas of freedom now ferried the consequences of freedom’s bitter price.

Integrated Network

It is against this bleak backdrop that the post-Independence rebuilding acquires its sheen of national determination. Reconnecting Jammu became an urgent priority, both strategic and symbolic. In 1951, the government unified 42 disparate railway companies into a single national system, reorganised into six zones a year later.

The newly christened Indian Railways also acquired an identity distinct from its colonial origins. If the Raj’s system had been built to extract, the Republic’s was rebuilt to integrate. The trains became mobile proof that a land divided on religious lines could still be bound by steel.

Modernisation - technical, organisational and cultural - became the leitmotif of the post-1950 era. The 1950s and 60s marked the beginning of India’s quiet railway revolution. Electrification, still negligible at Independence, accelerated with the introduction of AC locomotives. In 1959, the arrival of the first such engine named ‘Jagjivan Ram’ ushered in a new age of speed and efficiency.

A year later, the Chittaranjan Locomotive Works began producing 1,500-volt DC engines at scale, a patriotic antecedent to today’s ‘Make in India’ initiative. The pace was disrupted by the 1965 war, but resumed steadily; by 2014, India had electrified over 21,800 km of track, a spectacular leap from the meagre 388 km in 1950.

Modernisation was not limited to the engines that pulled passengers. In 1956, the first air-conditioned train between Delhi and Howrah introduced a new standard of comfort. The Taj Express (1964) married speed with amenities, while the Rajdhani Express (1969) established high-speed intercity travel as a national aspiration. A generation later, the Samjhauta Express (1976) became a fragile symbol of détente with Pakistan. Even in diplomacy, the iron tracks found themselves enlisted.

By the mid-1980s, the railways embraced another revolution in form of digitisation. In 1986, the introduction of computerized reservations brought order to a chaotic booking culture. The launch of IRCTC’s online ticketing system in the 2000s, now a portal used by millions, made the railways one of the earliest mass-scale adopters of digital services in the country. A behemoth that once published timetables in bound almanacs now operated on the clicks of passengers from metros and hamlets alike.

Though passenger trains tend to dominate public imagination, the backbone of India’s economic expansion quietly rode on freight wagons. In 1950, the system moved a modest 37,565 tonnes of goods. By 2014, that figure had soared to over one billion tonnes. Coal, cement, steel, agricultural produce flowed through this network of wagons and sidings.

A nation aspiring toward industrialisation needed an industrial-scale carrier. Railways built that carrier, and did so while constructing 5,321 overbridges and underpasses by 2014, thus eliminating bottlenecks, smoothing supply chains and spurring regional commerce. In the story of India’s economic rise, the railways occupied centre stage.

Modern Governance

As trains grew faster and schedules more demanding, safety emerged as an urgent priority. New signalling systems, stronger tracks and rudimentary forms of electronic surveillance formed the early layers of safety infrastructure. Transparency improved with the 1994 live telecast of the Railway Budget, which helped demystify a system long considered impenetrable.

By the early 2000s, safety and service delivery became increasingly intertwined with technology. Digital platforms allowed passengers to check running status, complaint portals opened communication channels and online payments took the railways firmly into the 21st century.

If the railways were the circulatory system of the national economy, they also became the connective tissue of its cities. India’s first metro - the Kolkata Metro, inaugurated in 1984 - brought rapid transit to urban commuters long before such systems became fashionable. Chennai’s MRTS and Hyderabad’s MMTS followed, precursors to the metro boom of the 21st century.

No urban rail service, however, matches the mythic status of the Mumbai locals. Often described as the city’s ‘beating heart,’ they transport millions daily. Thus, a rickshaw driver’s child could ride the same train as an executive, shrinking the distance between aspiration and opportunity. For a country negotiating deep social cleavages, railways became unlikely theatres of coexistence.

Railways also reflect the demographic shifts of the post-Partition decades. Before 1947, Muslims constituted just over 24 percent of British India’s population. After Partition, 52 percent of them migrated to Pakistan; the rest remained in India. Pakistan acquired 23 percent of undivided India’s territory and 40 percent of its railway network. Post-Partition India was left with fewer tracks, fewer workshops and fewer strategic routes but with the larger burden of constructing a coherent, durable network for its diverse and expanding population.

The response over the next seven decades was astonishing. From 10,000km of usable track in 1947, India expanded to over 63,000km by 2014. Villages once reachable only by bullock-cart gained access to markets; hill states saw tunnels and bridges; remote tribal belts found themselves on the timetable. In scale and ambition, few countries have attempted anything similar in so compressed a period.

The story of India’s railways after 1947 is one of continuity and reinvention. It preserves steam engines in museums while rolling out AC locomotives on main lines. It maintains century-old stations even as it builds metro rails and freight corridors.

The establishment of Delhi’s National Rail Museum in 1977 ensured that the romance of steam would not be forgotten. Yet the same decades saw the rise of electrification, high-speed routes and digital booking systems. This duality of nostalgia coexisting with ambition is the railway’s peculiar charm.

Few metaphors capture this journey better than Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s famous lines from Agnipath: “You will never tire, you will never stop, you will never turn back.” They evoke perfectly the relentless, almost stoic ethic that powered the railways through war, political upheaval, fiscal strain and technological disruption.

From the trauma of Partition to the promise of digital innovation, the railways emerged as a national institution that bound destinies. It shrank distances, widened horizons and carried the republic’s dreams, sometimes quite literally, in its carriages.

As India prepared to enter the high-speed age after 2014, it did so on foundations laid painstakingly over seven decades of grit and reinvention. The tracks may have been laid by colonial engineers, but the modern railway is unmistakably Indian.