Mountain Railways of India

Mountain railways of India includes three railways. These railways have collectively been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway was the first, and is still the most outstanding, example of a hill passenger railway. Opened in 1881, its design applies bold ingenious engineering solutions to the problem of establishing an effective rail link across a mountainous terrain of great beauty. The construction of the Nilgiri Mountain Railway, a 46-km long metre-gauge single-track railway in Tamil Nadu State was first proposed in 1854, but due to the difficulty of the mountainous location the work only started in 1891 and was completed in 1908. This railway, scaling an elevation of 326 m to 2,203 m, represented the latest technology of the time. The Kalka Shimla Railway, a 96-km long, single track working rail link built in the 1910 to provide a service to the highland town of Shimla is emblematic of the technical and material efforts to disenclave mountain populations through the railway. All three railways are still fully operational.

The mountain railways in the hills emerged as a result of the delayed interest evinced during the British Raj for establishing control over the Himalayas and other mountain ranges of India. It was in 1844 that Sir John Lawrence, the then Viceroy of India, had mooted the idea of a phased colonization of the hills, particularly as military garrisons. The British, in a proposal termed simply as ‘Hill Railway’, considered establishing geographically and culturally rich, stations across the country. The hill stations chosen for this purpose were Shimla, the then 'summer capital' of British India; Darjeeling, known for its tea gardens and scenic views of the eastern Himalayas in the state of West Bengal, Ootacamund in the Nilgiri mountains of Tamil Nadu and the Matheran hill station in the Western Ghats near Mumbai were considered.

...
Wikipedia