Railway People

Note from Gene Blanchette:  No Revoluition Theology today! Just a gentle piece on the world in which I spent my first 16 years:

I don’t know who wrote this article — I found it on the web in a travel section.  The sense of the article agrees with my memories of the railway colony.  Note the reference to ” ..the gentle folk of Wales….”.  Also note the reference to the “..all powerful Loco Foremen..”  Dad was a Loco Foremen in the shop in Ajmer.  After we went to England, my mother was often asked which part of Wales she came from.  The underlining emphasis is mine.

“We were Railway People. And when we said that, we had said everything. It expressed who we were, what we did, how we behaved and dressed and spoke. We spoke a fast, English patois. Many of the gentle folk of Wales had laid down the bedrock of our railways and their lilt influenced the rhythm of our speech.

The Trains of India

My family began our century and a half Indian adventure as soldiers of the (East India) Company.  Their “dogs of war”.

We ended it by spending nearly a century maintaining their “wheels of war” and commerce.  The Indian railway was the lifeline and supreme monument of the Raj.  That railway was our whole world.

My father, his father and his father’s father worked for the railway.  My mother’s father, his father and his father’s father also worked for the railway. It housed us, it educated us, it trained us, it provided decent jobs for us, it provided hospitals for our sick, and it buried us when we died.