But Fans Flock to India : This Steamy Romance Is Doomed

“Here we are, chasing dinosaurs,” said the tall Englishman with the wild nest of hair above his long, bony face.

Back home in Brighton, on England’s south coast, Lawrence Marshall, 57, is a perfectly proper banker. But here in northern India recently, he was a hunter of steam locomotives--a “gricer” in the jargon of his railway cult--leading 22 fellow enthusiasts on what he has titled “The Seventh Great Indian Train Journey.”

Their goal is to view, photograph and--when possible--ride as many steam locomotives as they can before the engines disappear forever from the world’s rails.

“They are all doomed, I’m afraid,” Marshall observed.

Dozen Specimens

Surrounding him in the Indian Northern Railway roundhouse and engine workshop in Moradabad were about a dozen of the endangered species, steam locomotives hissing and snorting like great iron tyrannosaurs.

A few other engines stood cold and idle in various stages of mechanical undress. One “loco” even had a large, grimy rhesus monkey sitting on its boiler roof. The monkey appeared to be staring back in bemusement at the Englishman with the tousled hair.

To make the quest possible, Marshall had written more than 150 letters to various officials in the elephantine Indian bureaucracy, obtaining permission to take photographs and tour locomotive sheds.

Less scrupulous gricers--a term of uncertain derivation that was fostered in English railroad clubs--have also been known to sneak into the sheds late at night to get a clandestine glimpse of their beloved engines.

On this trip, Marshall hired a railroad sleeper car to attach to working steam engines. His was launched on a three-week, 3,548-mile journey that will take it from the Indian capital, New Delhi, along the course of the Ganges River to Calcutta, down the eastern Indian coastline to Madras and finally to a narrow-gauge run in the Nilgiri mountains of South India.

On a recent day in February, the grimy sleeper car was attached to the excruciatingly slow No. 308 train from Old Delhi Station to Moradabad, home of one of the world’s last operating steam locomotive roundhouses, the sites where locomotives are switched and repaired.

The train’s engineer, a burly man of the Rajput, or warrior, caste named Radhey Singh, was tolerant enough to let the foreigners hold the wishbone-shaped regulator that controls the flow of steam to the engine’s pistons and pull on the whistle cord to their heart’s content. He even stopped the train in front of a bridge over the Ganges River so that they could clamber out and snap pictures.

The No. 1 fireman, J. K. Sarkar, was a broad-shouldered fellow with a headband who was more than happy to let the foreign guests sling a few shovels of coal into the fire hole.

By late afternoon, the gricers were scattered around the Moradabad rail yard, notebooks and cameras in hand, recording the last breaths of the steam age. In intensity of purpose and action, they were like archeologists racing the rising waters of a new dam or anthropologists recording the customs of a dying tribe.

“When steam goes, it tends to go very fast,” lamented one of the gricers, Eduardo Tonarelli, an Italian manufacturer of brass tubing who lives in West Germany. “If you look back only 15 years, there was still lots of steam in Western Europe, especially in Spain. Now it is virtually all gone.”

World’s Top Center

India, with the world’s fourth largest network of track (36,000 miles) and third busiest passenger service (more than 10 million riders each day), has more working steam locomotives than any other country.

More than 5,000 steam engines still puff and toot here, ranging from the big American-designed, New York Central-style, broad-gauge engines to the tiny, narrow-gauge “toy” trains of the old British stations in the Himalayan foothills.

Although one country, China, still manufactures some steam engines, the number and variety of the engines are greater in India than anywhere else.

The Indian railroad is one of the most important and lasting legacies of 200 years of British rule that ended in 1947. Before the railroad network, and the introduction of English as a link language, what is now India was more a loose confederation of linguistic regions and small principalities than a nation.

It was the railroad that unified the new Indian state. And when independence came to the Indian people, it had traveled there on the power of steam.

Now Turning to Diesel

But what was once a steam-dominated railroad is now turning to diesel. The end of the steam age in India is in sight.

Raj Kumar Jain, 56, is chairman of the board of Indian Railways, a government-owned behemoth with 1.8 million employees, a work force twice the size of the Indian army, that the Guinness Book of World Records lists as the world’s largest employer.

For the last several years, the railroads have made substantial profits. Officials are busy pouring the money back into new equipment, including new diesel engines to replace the fleet of steam locomotives.

“We are phasing out the steam locos,” Jain said. “By the year 2000, we will have cleared out every one of them.”

Not everyone agrees with the government policy to rid the rail system of steam. Indian railroad historian Gudial S. Khosla, 76, thinks the switch will make Indian Railways too dependent on petroleum products, some of which must be imported.

During the oil-supply crisis of the 1970s, he said, even the railroads in the United States were reconsidering development of steam locomotion.

Worried About Dependence

“I think that steam should not completely leave, particularly in areas where we have large coal supplies,” Khosla said. “Our dependence on diesel is not a safe thing.”

However, the trend has been established. At one time, when the Indian network was entirely steam, 24,000 steam locomotives plied the rails here, including some that were the personal possessions of the various princes--maharajahs, nabobs, nizams and the like--who had their own domains within the Indian subcontinent.

By 1960, the number had dropped to 10,000. The erosion continued, and in the last two years, railways board chairman Jain said, the system has mothballed 1,400 more engines, bringing the total down to slightly more than 5,000.

Now, most of the steam engines are assigned to industrial uses, in the jute mills and sugar mills, and to hauling only the slowest-moving passenger trains.

The number of steam trains has fallen so rapidly that train enthusiast Marshall insisted that this will be his last organized steam-engine tour of India. He had led six before this trip.

“In 1970, when we took our first trip, there were 25 different classes of broad-gauge steam locomotives running around. Now there are only four,” he said. “It has become almost impossible to see steam engines every day.”

Air of Near-Desperation

Perhaps that is why there was an air of near-desperation about Marshall and his fellow train enthusiasts gathered at the Moradabad roundhouse.

Besides Marshall and Tonarelli, the group includes several engineers, a management consultant, an accountant, a museum official and even several railroad men on a busman’s holiday.

Within the group there are different--sometimes feuding--factions.

Marshall, for example, is a memorabilia collector. His home in Brighton is a personal railroad museum stuffed with boiler plates and steam gauges from 20 years of “gricing.”

Tonarelli and several of his colleagues are what is known irreverently among the gricers as “number snatchers.” (“Number recorders,” corrected Tonarelli, who objects to the less flattering term).

These are railroad enthusiasts who carefully note down the locomotive number and the boiler plate number of all the steam trains that they see. Armed with this information, they return to railroad libraries and research the histories of the sighted machines. Long after steam locomotion has departed the land, somewhere in the files of English and European railroad clubs will be a detailed record of the movements of the last engines.

Extremist Fringe

Also on the tour are several of the extremist fringe of gricing--the so-called “track bashers.”

“These are people who try to cover as much track as they can,” explained Marshall, marveling a little bit at their zealotry.

(One of the heroes of the track-bashing faction is the late Rogers E. M. Whitaker, a wealthy New Yorker who claimed to have traveled every inch of track in the United States. He often wrote about his adventures in the New Yorker magazine, under the nom de plume E. M. Frimbo.)

Finally, there are the most controversial gricers, a purist offshoot known as “line-siders.” These are gricers who chase the steam engines around the Indian countryside in automobiles, which give the enthusiast more flexibility of movement and allow better opportunities for photographing moving trains.

To many gricers, however, the idea of riding a much-despised automobile to hunt their beloved trains is like shooting deer from a four-wheel-drive jeep: It is not fun and definitely not sporting.

29-Year Passion

Audrey Peattie, an Englishwoman from Watford, northwest of London, is the only one of the group who has also done “line siding.” Her passion for steam engines began 29 years ago in London, inspired by her oldest son, then only 3 years old.

“We were at the park one day when we saw a steam train coming out of Paddington Station,” she recalled. “After that, my son refused to go to the park and would only go to the station. We went every day. If we weren’t there, the station manager would become concerned.”

Today, her son, now 32, works in the signals department of British Rail, and Peattie herself is a dedicated steam-locomotive buff.

“To me,” she said, “a steam engine is a living thing. It is not just a machine. It has a character all its own. Although they look very similar, they don’t always perform the same way. The drivers say they are rather like women.”

To gricers, steam engines are animate.

“They eat coal and drink water and are moody,” said Marshall.

“The steam engine is an engine that breathes,” said Godfrey Gould, 56, a management consultant from Brighton.

“I know when I see a steam engine, it seems to be alive,” said Julia Sharp, an accountant from the town of Hove.

Romance of Steam

Even the uninitiated traveler in India has a hard time resisting the romance of steam.

On a recent moonless night, a vacationing American found himself on a railroad siding somewhere outside Jaipur in the Rajasthan Desert. It was midnight, and the No. 15 Chetak Express, already five hours late on its overnight journey from Old Delhi Station to the lake city of Udaipur, had stopped dead on the siding to let a northbound freight train pass.

There was a muffled, deep-throated whistle from the approaching locomotive. The passenger sleepily parted the curtains and peered out the window of his first-class cabin.

Framed in the blackness of the desert night was a sight he would never forget: an engine cabin fireman, his bare brown arms and face glistening with sweat despite the winter air, shoveling a scoop of powdery coal into the gaping orange fire hole of the passing steam engine.

The image remained clear and powerful long after the train had passed.

The passenger felt that it was not just a train that he had witnessed but the perfect evocation of an era, the age of steam, that had almost completely disappeared in the rest of the world and would soon evanesce even here, in India, the last great home of steam locomotion.