Nilgiri Mountain Railway

Where it sits. The Nilgiri Mountain Railway climbs 45.8 km from Mettupalayam, on the hot plain north of Coimbatore at about 330 m, to Udhagamandalam (Ooty) at 2,240 m in the Nilgiri Mountains of Tamil Nadu. It is a 1,000 mm metre-gauge line — locals call it the toy train — and it is the only rack railway in India. Between Mettupalayam and Coonoor the track uses the Abt rack-and-pinion system to hold the train against gradients that average 1 in 24.5 and reach 1 in 12, or 8.33 per cent, the steepest railway gradient in Asia. The full route takes in 208 curves, 16 tunnels and around 250 bridges.

The story behind it. A mountain railway to the Nilgiris was first proposed in 1854; it took forty-five years of surveys, cost disputes and abandoned schemes before the Mettupalayam–Coonoor section opened for traffic in June 1899, worked initially by the Madras Railway on the government's behalf. In 1907 the line received four second-hand Double Fairlie locomotives that had been built by the Avonside Engine Company in 1879–80 for service in Afghanistan and had sat in store since 1887. The extension onward from Coonoor reached Fernhill in September 1908 and Udhagamandalam on 15 October 1908, roughly nineteen kilometres of new track for about 2.44 million rupees. In July 2005 UNESCO added the line to the World Heritage listing already held by the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, and the property was renamed Mountain Railways of India.

The machines. The rack section is worked by X Class steam locomotives, most of them built by the Swiss Locomotive and Machine Works at Winterthur, with the newest completed at the Golden Rock workshops in India in August 2021. The engine is marshalled at the downhill end and pushes the carriages up, which is why the classic photograph of this line shows a plume of steam behind rather than in front. Diesels handle the adhesion-only Coonoor–Udhagamandalam stretch. Water stops at Kallar, Adderly, Hillgrove and Runneymede exist purely to refill the tanks, and passengers spill out onto the ballast at Hillgrove for tea while the fireman works. Uphill takes about four hours and fifty minutes; downhill, with gravity helping, about three hours and thirty-five minutes.

On screen. This is the train from "Chaiyya Chaiyya". The sequence — composed by A. R. Rahman, written by Gulzar over a Bulleh Shah Sufi lyric, sung by Sukhwinder Singh and Sapna Awasthi — opens Mani Ratnam's Dil Se.. (1998) with Shah Rukh Khan and Malaika Arora dancing along the roof of a moving Nilgiri Mountain Railway train hauled by an X Class steam engine, choreographed by Farah Khan and photographed by Santosh Sivan. The shoot used the Ooty end of the line, where the gradient eases and the track curves through eucalyptus and tea. Nothing was locked off in a studio; the performers were harnessed to the roof of a real working heritage train. The result did more for the railway's public profile than a century of timetables, and it remains the reference image for Indian cinema shot on rails.

What the journey is actually like. Carriages are wooden-benched and narrow, windows open, and the line spends its first hour hauling through dry scrub before the temperature drops and the vegetation turns green and dripping. Leaving Mettupalayam the track is adhesion-worked and briefly drops before crossing the Bhavani River, then climbs gently to Kallar, where the rack begins and the gradient bites at once — the change in engine note is unmistakable. Above Hillgrove the track hugs cliff edges with unfenced drops on the valley side. Coonoor, the main intermediate station, sits at the top of the rack and beside the locomotive shed. Beyond it the line runs gently through tea estates via Wellington, Aravankadu, Ketti and Lovedale before descending slightly into Ooty. The 1908 terminus building survives, along with a steam water dispenser and a weighing scale made in Birmingham in 1907.

Getting there and timing. One daily train crosses the rack section, leaving Mettupalayam around 07:10 and arriving in Ooty near midday; the return departs Ooty at 14:00. Four trains a day each way shuttle the shorter Coonoor–Ooty leg, which is the practical option for anyone short on time. A summer extra runs in April and May. Tickets sell out weeks ahead in April, May and October, and the line still issues card Edmondson tickets for the full journey. October to May is the drier window; heavy monsoon rain between June and August triggers landslips that close the rack section for days at a time.