You are quite right about the Rajdhanni being number 12302... did you know that, or have you a copy
of the indispensible "trains at a glance"???
I do have a Trains at a Glance, but I don't need to look this one up.
That particular Rajdhani - Howrah - New Delhi - Howrah via Grand Chord, used to be my old stomping grounds. It was introduced in 1969, the first Rajdhani Express, which inaugurated a whole new class of trains. Originally its number was 101up/102down. Then during the great India train number rationalization it became 2301up/2302down (23 designating that the special express consists are homed and maintained in Howrah/Sealdah ER). And finally last year when they extended all train numbers to 5 digits it became 12301up/12302down. I regularly rode it 2 to 4 times each year between 1969 and 1977 when I left India for the US. I have ridden it several times since then on various visits to India.
When it was originally introduced it was pulled by a LeGrange built EMD IR Class WDM-4. Of course these days it gets a WAP-5 or WAP-7, the electric passenger workhorses of IR. You can see one of them, I think it is a WAP-5, in my avatar above.
Reading your writeup, sounds like you took the Amritsar Shatabdi from New Delhi? Even though there is nothing spectacularly noticeable on the way, you actually passed through some very historic locations, starting with Panipat, where anyone that ever managed to conquer Delhi had to fight a battle to get to Delhi. We jokingly used to talk about the n-th Battle of Panipat in our high school history classes. Then you passed through Kurukshetra where the epic battle of Mahabharata took place and the encounter between Arjuna and his estranged cousins that led to the composition of the Bhagavad Gita took place. Then Ambala which had a huge British Cantonment which exists to this day but now occupied by the Indian armed forces. The station is still called Ambala Cantonment. And finally of course Amritsar the home of Sikhism and its Golden Temple which you visited, and the border with Pakistan at Wagah which has seen military confrontation both in 1965 and 1971.
Edited by jis, 30 November 2011 - 02:45 PM.
