The train judders to a halt and jolts me out of deep sleep. I peer out of the carriage window into the foggy night. On the final leg of a 2,300-mile railway journey across India, we have pulled up at a station somewhere in Assam, in the north-eastern states. It is 3.05am. Under harsh overhead lights, dozens of people are sleeping on the platform, great lumpy bundles of bedding and shawls. I get up from my bunk bed, pad up the corridor of the sleeper carriage, a dark cave of snoring, and step down onto the platform.
Half-asleep fellow passengers fill their plastic water bottles from platform taps or drink tea poured from huge chrome kettles by wide-awake “chai wallahs”. Stray dogs dart past, scavenging for food.
Slowly the great caterpillar of carriages pulls off and we clamber back aboard. My wife, Clare, is still sleeping peacefully in the top bunk, unaware of Lumding, and I’m soon lulled back to sleep by the lumbering rhythm of train-on-track, train-on-track.
Clare and I have been trundling across India for 10 days. We started at the most westerly station on the regular passenger network – Okha in the state of Gujarat, 100 miles down the coast from Pakistan – and will soon be pulling into Ledo, the network’s most easterly station, a tiny Assamese town of tea gardens and coal mines. We could have done the bulk of this journey on one train, the Dwarka Express, but it runs only on Fridays. It sets off from Okha at just before noon and, 2,000 miles later, pulls into Guwahati, the capital of Assam, on Monday morning. Sixty-seven hours at an average speed of 30mph. We love Indian trains, but not that much.
