# The first train, and the telegraph
**पहली रेलगाड़ी और तार**

- Canonical page: https://indianepics.online/event/railway-1853/
- Chapter: [Company rule](https://indianepics.online/chapter/company.md)
- Track: evidence (archaeology and documents)
- When: 1853 CE – 1856 CE
- Where: Bori Bunder, Bombay (18.94, 72.835)
- Tags: science, trade, colonial

## Summary

On 16 April 1853 the first passenger train runs 34 km from Bori Bunder to Thane; by 1856 telegraph wires link Calcutta, Agra, Bombay and Madras.

16 अप्रैल 1853 को पहली यात्री रेलगाड़ी बोरी बंदर से ठाणे तक 34 किमी चली; 1856 तक तार लाइनों ने कलकत्ता, आगरा, बंबई और मद्रास को जोड़ दिया।

## Account

The Great Indian Peninsula Railway's first train, fourteen carriages behind three locomotives, left Bori Bunder in the afternoon of 16 April 1853 with about 400 passengers and ran 21 miles to Thane. The East Indian Railway opened its first line out of Howrah the next year. Dalhousie's railway minute of 1853 laid out the trunk routes, built by private companies on a guaranteed return of five per cent paid from Indian revenues.

The telegraph came at the same time. William O'Shaughnessy's line from Calcutta to Diamond Harbour opened in 1851, and by 1856 some 4,000 miles of wire connected Calcutta, Agra, Bombay, Madras and Peshawar. On 11 May 1857 the Delhi telegraph office sent the first warning of the rising up the line to the Punjab.

The guarantee system made Indian railways expensive and tied them to British industry, and nationalists from Dadabhai Naoroji onward counted them part of the drain of wealth. They also knit the subcontinent into a single market.

## Sources

- Danvers, Report to the Secretary of State for India in Council on Railways in India to the end of the year 1859 (1860) — https://archive.org/details/india.history.resource.109260
- Arnold, The Marquis of Dalhousie's Administration of British India, vol. I (1862) — https://archive.org/details/TheMarquisOfDalhousieSAdministrationOfBritishIndiaVolI
- Shridharani, Story of the Indian Telegraphs: A Century of Progress — https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.242905 (Diamond Harbour line 1851; 4,000 miles to Peshawar, Bombay and Madras by February 1856)

## Image

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (Victoria Terminus). Joe Ravi, CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AChhatrapati_Shivaji_Terminus_(Victoria_Terminus).jpg

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