Mumbai to Pune Heritage Tour: The Extraordinary Victorian Railway That 42,000 Workers Built Through the Western Ghats and Changed India Forever cover art

Mumbai to Pune Heritage Tour: The Extraordinary Victorian Railway That 42,000 Workers Built Through the Western Ghats and Changed India Forever

Mumbai to Pune Heritage Tour: The Extraordinary Victorian Railway That 42,000 Workers Built Through the Western Ghats and Changed India Forever

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In 1854 a British engineer looked up at the Western Ghats and proposed building a railway through them.His superiors said no.He proposed it again. No. Again. No.For decades the answer was always some version of the same thing. The gradients were too steep. The terrain was too difficult. The engineering was impossible. The Western Ghats rose over 1800 feet in sixteen miles between the Konkan coastal plain and the Deccan Plateau, and no conventional railway locomotive could climb a gradient that severe without simply sliding back down the hill.But there was cotton on the other side of those hills. Vast quantities of extraordinary quality cotton growing on the Deccan Plateau, the cotton that the mills of Lancashire needed and that the port of Bombay could export to the world if only someone could find a way to get it down the mountain.Between 1856 and 1863 someone did.Forty-two thousand workers at the peak of construction. Twenty-five tunnels blasted through solid basalt by hand. Eight stone viaducts rising up to 160 feet above the valley floor. Fifty-four million cubic feet of rock excavated over seven years. And a reversing station at Khandala, a piece of Victorian railway engineering so unusual it has no equivalent anywhere else in India, that allowed trains to climb a gradient that every expert had declared impossible by switching direction in a zigzag pattern that traded distance for steepness.The Times of London called it one of the greatest triumphs of 19th-century civil engineering in the world.The tunnels are still there. The viaducts are still there. The trains still use them today. And the story of who built them, including a Victorian woman from Leek in Staffordshire who took over the construction contract after her husband died within a month of arriving in India and managed the most complex engineering project in Asia from England for seven years, is one of the most extraordinary and most completely untold stories in the history of Indian railway heritage.This is the complete story of the Bhor Ghat railway, the Mumbai to Pune heritage tour and the extraordinary human drama behind the engineering achievement that changed India forever.What You Will Discover in This EpisodeThe complete story of why the British East India Company needed to conquer the Western Ghats, the extraordinary commercial imperative of the Deccan cotton trade and how the American Civil War made the Bhor Ghat railway not just desirable but urgently necessary for the survival of the Lancashire textile industryThe specific engineering challenge of the Bhor Ghat, why the gradients of one in forty and in some sections one in thirty-seven were far beyond the capability of any conventional adhesion railway locomotive and what the specific technical solution, the reversing station at Khandala, actually involved and how it workedThe complete story of the construction between 1856 and 1863, the number of workers that grew from 10,000 in 1856 to over 20,000 in 1857 to a peak of 42,000 in January 1861, the conditions they worked in on bamboo scaffolding above drops of up to 160 feet, the cholera and malaria that swept through the crowded tent cities on the hillside and the several thousand who never came homeThe extraordinary story of Alice Tredwell, born in Leek Staffordshire in 1823, who took over the construction contract for the most difficult section of the Bhor Ghat railway after her husband Solomon died within a month of arriving in India, managed it for seven years from England through two appointed engineers, inherited £70,000 and chose to honour the contract rather than walk away, was described by a Victorian engineer as having assumed the contract with a remarkable degree of spirit and judgment, also photographed the construction in photographs now preserved in the archives of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London, completed the project successfully in 1863 and died four years later aged 44 without being mentioned in the Governor's opening ceremony speechThe opening ceremony at Khandala on April 21 1863 attended by the Governor of Bombay Sir Bartle Frere, the speech that celebrated the English engineers and compared the railway to the cave temples of ancient India while making almost no mention of Alice Tredwell or the tens of thousands of Indian workers whose labour and whose lives made the achievement possibleThe 25 tunnels and 8 stone viaducts of the Bhor Ghat railway, their specific engineering achievements and the extraordinary fact that they are still carrying the Mumbai to Pune railway traffic over 160 years after they were builtThe Karla and Bhaja Buddhist cave temples near Lonavala, carved from the same basalt cliffs that the Victorian engineers blasted through, funded by Buddhist merchants who used the same Bhor Ghat mountain pass two thousand years before the railway arrived, demonstrating that the route through the Western Ghats has been one of the most commercially significant geographical ...
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