are they really going to build all of these?

>>212076069 (OP)
They're gonna need a shit ton of gift cards to fund them

can't wait to bully united stadians about having worse railways than fucking india

>>212076069 (OP)
>saars atop a train going 300km/h
kino

Why would they do this
Dont they know the train is their natural predator

>>212076069 (OP)
>2041
>2051

Really nigga? India will be dead from climate change by then anyway.

>>212076101
lol

>>212076116
the last time i checked out the progress of munbai-ahmedabad line, it looked like it was already halfway done.

>>212076069 (OP)
Lol. They will not.

>[...] the mutiny confirmed for the British the military advantage that the railways offered, as loyal armies could in future make their way at record speed and contain any threat of rebellion. This, perhaps, was among the reasons that agitated Gandhi when he beheld the welding of India’s geography with steel and steam. He declared ominously that this was all for ‘bad men [to] fulfil their evil designs with greater rapidity’.
>Leaving the Mahatma’s suspicions aside, the railways in India roused many, from Rudyard Kipling to Rabindranath Tagore, Florence Nightingale to R.K. Narayan. Talk of its introduction in the subcontinent began in the 1830s and, ironically, the concerns raised were endless. One question was of viability: would ‘the Hindoos’, with their caste and religious taboos, embrace the railways, or would they boycott it resolutely? In the event, ‘the Hindoos’ nodded approval: pilgrimages that took weeks could now be covered in days, even if by means of the devil’s contraption. Others argued that the fire carriage was at best a vanity project—India’s destiny lay in waterways, insisted Sir Arthur Cotton, whom we encountered in a previous essay. Yet another set of people welcomed the steam engine for its political potential. ‘If India is to become a homogenous nation,’ wrote Sir T. Madhava Rao, the nineteenth-century statesman, ‘it must be by means of the Railways [and]… the English language.’ (Good for him that he lived then, for today he would be labelled anti-national.)

I like 19th-early 20th century history, it really does always feel like an ancient world crashing into ours

>The dawn of the Indian railways (now the fourth largest in the world, transporting billions, and with over a million employees), like new technology in general, inspired opportunity while also birthing subversion. As the scholar Arup K. Chatterjee writes, the railways could become ‘clandestine spaces for experimentation’ where ‘vegetarian looking businessmen’ tasted chicken and mutton: everyday universe, days and hours spent on the track offered a window into something new, something that was usually taboo. To Europeans in India, meanwhile, the way the railways functioned offered a ‘nominal provincial Europe’ on wheels, where the food, cutlery, decor and everything else reminded them of home. There could also be disease and horror—to quote Ira Klein, ‘plague [too] rode the rails’. In 1947, similarly, the railways conveyed death across the border, as photographs recorded their role in the appalling tragedy of India’s partition.
>The British, of course, presented the railways as proof of their civilising mission—this, when it was an elaborate commercial enterprise delivering obscene profits to English investors at the expense of the Indian peasant. The railways also allowed for architectural experiments: buildings like the erstwhile Victoria Terminus in Bombay projected colonial splendour, visually stamping India with the presence (and threat) of British supremacy. To the dismay of the architects of empire, however, the railways also ended up transporting that inconvenient thing called nationalism. Soon, even the Mahatma was able to Indianise the railways, using it, as Chatterjee notes, to collect donations just as much as to demand Swaraj, every station and every third-class carriage a platform for his invigorating politics. Revolutionaries, meanwhile, could disrupt rail lines, and even such small things as travelling ticketless or pulling the chain became acts of civil disobedience.