The oldest living historian on Indian railways, Dr Ian J
Kerr, is on a week-long visit to India and can’t wait to see the
Khandala railway line.

Mumbai railway, the lifeline of the city, has been one of the defining fixtures
of the metropolis ever since its conception. Millions have availed the service
daily while visitors hardly give it a miss while in town. Not many, however,
would know details such as 40,000 workers toiled hard for years and more than
10,000 died during the construction of the Khandala railway line. But then Dr
Ian J Kerr is no ordinary visitor.

The 72-year-old Canadian, the oldest living historian on Indian railways, is in
India for a week on a personal visit. His large body of work, including a
number of books and several dedicated academic research papers on the subject,
has given the Indian railways’ heritage and history a new lease of life. And
now he is in Mumbai to see the 19th century engineering marvels that created
India’s first railways.

Kerr, who will be going to the Khandala railway line to see the massive piers, tunnels
and bridges that ferry trains, said, “I have researched and written so
much about them all my life. Now, I want to see them all. For the construction
of the Bhor Ghat section, which is now known as the Khandala railway line
between Mumbai and Pune, workers came from all castes and communities, from
near and far, to work as per their expertise. The breaking of the barrier of the
Sayhadri mountain range was an important milestone.”

Asenior scholar with the University of Manitoba in Canada, Dr Kerr said
railways are such a socially-connected subject that while researching on India,
information about trains and rail lines kept cropping up during his various
studies.

“That is how I gained interest in it. The railway museum at CST is a
treasure house of information with crateloads of documents and archives. The
last time I interacted with top officials at railway board in New Delhi, I
suggested them to collect such archives and documents from various zones and
centralise them at one place so that there could be a national railway
archive,” he said.

In fact, now many of the important documents have been shifted to the record
centre of the national archives at Jaipur. “The enormous effect the
railroads had on colonial and postcolonial India is indisputable,” he
added.Meanwhile at CST, a fan had come to meet Dr Kerr. A railway veteran
himself,90-year-old R Venkataraman, with his child-like passion for
trains, is touring India to write a book of his own.

A former railwayman, Venkataraman asked Kerr to pen down the foreword for his
forthcoming book. “Every word that Dr Kerr has written is worth a million
dollars,” he said.