A few months ago, I stood on the platform in Shin-Omuta station – which serves the small city of Omuta, on the south-westerly Japanese island of Kyushu. I had just stepped off a "slow" commuter service, and wasn’t entirely paying attention to my surroundings – so that when the bullet train from Fukuoka to Kagoshima came racing through at 160 miles per hour, I was almost knocked off my feet.

There is something about the sight of a shinkansen in full flow which still speaks of the future – even though Japan’s ground-breaking take on rail travel first blazed across Honshu in 1964. It is the roar of wind as it dashes past you, its split-second presence (the top operating speed for a bullet train is 200mph), which still seems like a vision from a science-fiction movie. It is something which can only be appreciated from a trackside spot – a journey on the train itself is so swift that the pace of it is lost in a blur of motion.

I was brought back to this random encounter in a distant corner of the Far East – I’m sure my reaction was something akin to the astonishment of farmworkers on glimpsing George Stephenson’s Rocket in 1829 – by reports that India is toying with constructing a bullet-train network of its own.

In theory, this is a glorious idea. India, after all, is the world’s seventh largest country, and its second most populous, home to a head-count of 1.2 billion people. It is a place where a revolution in internal transport would make a big difference. It is also one of the globe’s most booming economies. Where is the downside?

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The answers to that question are “money”, “money”, and “money”. And the fact that, for now, any thought of India forging a rail system to rival those in France, Japan and China is partly based on the sparkling promises of the current Prime Minister. Narendra Modi was elected by a landslide last May having talked a fine game about creating a modern country in keeping with its size and ambition. One of the offered innovations was a total restructuring of the rail network. “Why do our railway stations need to be so old?,” he asked during a triumphalist speech last July. “Why can’t they be better than our airports?”

Why indeed? But having attained the top job, Modi has been, to an extent, inching back from his grand pronouncements. Earlier this month, his Railways Minister Suresh Prabhu suggested that each kilometre of the necessary high-speed track would cost around £14 million – a sum that smacked of reality being introduced to a blueprint made of stardust.

Nonetheless, India is gently shuffling towards a radical rail overhaul. A feasibility study (involving Japanese expertise) is underway. And while a series of what Modi has referred to as "Diamond Quadrilateral" lines would take decades to complete, there are plans for a halfway-house "semi-high-speed" service which would be a huge improvement on the status quo. Last July, an experimental version of this compromise covered the 140 miles between New Delhi and Agra at 100mph. And there is tentative chatter about forging such a connection between Kolkata (Calcutta) and Delhi which would see trains manage the 923-mile odyssey in nine hours. The current time for this route, using the existing infrastructure, is closer to 36 hours. On average, Indian trains "move" at around 31mph.

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And here is the nub of the problem. India’s train system is a remarkable piece of engineering: some 71,000 physical miles of track, 41,000 miles of network and 7,172 stations – a colossus which carries 23 million passengers each day and 8.4 billion every year. And all at soil-scraping prices which keep its carriages within financial reach of much of the population. It is India’s veins, arteries and capillaries – and many of its vital organs too.

However, it is also enormously antiquated – a very literal legacy of the Raj era in that much of it was laid down while India was under British control. Only 6,000 of those 40,000 miles of network have been built since independence in 1947. The other 85 per cent of the system is rather older. The first train on Indian turf rolled between Bombay (Mumbai) and Thane – a 21-mile jaunt through (what is now the state of) Maharashtra – on April 16, 1853. By 1880, after a wave of Victorian enthusiasm and investment, 9,000 miles of track had been pinned into position. Bombay and Calcutta were linked in 1870.

It would take a similar explosion of effort to convert what is a 19th century relic into a 21st century phenomenon. Would India lose some of its character as a result? Perhaps a little. The trundling, passenger-stuffed cavalcade of carriages is one of the most evocative images of travel in the sub-continent – a clanking process taking days over a journey that could be done in hours by plane. In many ways, its decrepit railway is a crucial part of India’s soul. Mahatma Gandhi made most of his tours of the country in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties – building momentum for his policy of non-violent resistance to its colonial masters – by rail. His final foray – his remains being transferred from New Delhi to Allahabad (in Uttar Pradesh), where his ashes were scattered in the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna in the wake of his assassination in January 1948 – was also by train.

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That, at least, is the romantic view. A more pragmatic approach is that train travel in India is hot, stuffy and decidedly unreliable – even if, as a tourist, you have booked a berth in a first-class compartment. And it holds back a nation of high potential and huge resources.

Its torturous wheel-dragging also ensures that it is only ever possible to see so much of India. Many roads are cluttered and impassable, the distances gargantuan. You can, of course, hop around by air. But that has its delays and its disadvantages – not least that, as you jump from one air-conditioned terminal to another, you lose sight of the destination.



Imagine zipping from Mumbai to the beaches of Goa, along the side of the Arabian Sea, in an afternoon (Photo: AP/Fotolia)

Imagine an India where you could race from Kochi to Bengalaru (Bangalore) in a few hours, watching the rural flanks of Kerala and Karnataka flash past. Where you could zip from Mumbai to the beaches of Goa, along the side of the Arabian Sea, in an afternoon – or swap lunch at Colaba market for Rajasthan, Jodhpur and the Mehrangarh Fort before the sun sets. Where you could visit Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Udaipur and the foothills of the Himalayas in less than a fortnight without missing a scrap of the mileage in between.

It is a splendid prospect. It is a moot point too – such a scenario may be half a century away. Yet an India with a railway network fit for contemporary purpose would cease to be a desirable, but difficult, venue for holidays – and hit the top of everybody’s travel list.