Parallel Existence

Meet the trainspotters. They take time off to spend hours on the tracks, studying the colour of an engine or the history of a compartment. They8217;re simply obsessed with the Indian Railways

THEY SEEM PEDESTRIAN enough, these people. Swinging between work and wants, cares and compulsions, they flit through life at a banal pace. Yet, often enough they chug to a different beat. They track a passion that verges on an obsession, veers through the nation and wheels into ex-istence an unlikely grid. It8217;s called the Indian Railways Fan Club of America IRFCA, a worldwide community of railway fans hitched to a website irfca.org, a singu-lar platform to converge at and cap the cu-riosity that strings them together.

With sights trained on all things rail, the members prey on information with a matchless appetite, travelling to innocuous corners of the country to capture the un-known. So, every month or two, beset by an urge beyond their ken, they plan, pack and perch atop trains to repress the rover8217;s itch, pandering to their preoccupation despite their occupations.

8216;8216;I8217;ve travelled to Rameswaram in the south, Jammu in the north, Bhuj in the west and Jalpaiguri in the east,8217;8217; says 31-year-old Vikas Singh, a brand manager with Reckitt Benckiser in Delhi. His secret stimulant is the narrow gauge. 8216;8216;It8217;s probably the least re- searched subject. Do you know there8217;s 2,800 km of narrow gauge track in India?8217;8217; he asks.

Needless to say, he has spanned the stretch in the past five years, about three years after the passion set in. 8216;8216;It started with an article I read on how the world8217;s oldest metre gauge line lay at Delhi8217;s doorstep. So my first trip was the 11 km of metre gauge from Garhi Hasraru near Gurgaon to Farukh Nagar,8217;8217; he says.

As the metre gauge has been practically wiped off the Indian terrain, Mohan, a Delhi-based PR consultant, wants to make sure he goes through the remaining ones. So he has been to places like Jaipur in Rajasthan and Purna in Maharashtra to Lumding in Assam, taking off for three-four days every month. They all do that. Meeting at a designated railway station every fortnight or in a month8212;it8217;s a sacrilege to consider venues other than stations8212;-they plan future ven-tures.

Families are almost always given a miss and women fans are too few to count, so it8217;s male friends or fans who invariably take the trip. A typical sojourn lasts three to four days but can go up to 20 days, depending on the time at hand. 8216;8216;And as there are four doors in a compartment, it makes sense to go as a four-some, each one perched on a door with a notebook in hand,8217;8217; says 40-year-old Sridhar Joshi, an insurance executive in Chennai, who does 8216;8216;at least 500 km a month8217;8217; and is in-tent on covering all the branch lines.

Notebooks scrapbooks, whatever take in the members8217; individual interests, ranging from the colour of locos livery to their type steam, diesel, electric, from the architecture of a station to the discovery of a historic lock or an ancient saloon a compartment carry-ing rail officials only. The handbooks are a vi-tal accessory, as after every trip, all informa-tion is put on the site for the other fans.

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Updating the site is one of the webmasters, Shashanka Nanda8212;a lover of locos and ex-plorer of unknown places8212;who is also an ad-ministrator of IFRCA8217;s mailing list. 8216;8216;I act as a moderator and see that the discussion stays within a desired frame,8217;8217; says the 27-year-old. For a site that was started in 1989 by some Indian students in the US and hence the 8216;America8217; in the acronym, IRFCA has grown from 50 to nearly 3,500 members. Some of these fans have winged out their interests8212; Singh is an avid philatelist with rare stamps on the Indian Railways, while Kolkata-based Samit Roychoudhury, 36, has penned The Great Indian Railway Atlas and is ready with his second book on locomotives. Whatever the specifics, it8217;s the trains that top the fetish chart, endless travel that turns them on.