Sindh, Sultan, and Sahib: The Names That Never Were

by Simon Darvill, 2026

In 1852, the Vulcan Foundry delivered eight locomotives to the Great Indian Peninsular Railway. They were 2-4-0 tender engines, built for main-line passenger work, and they would go on to make history. On 16th April 1853, three of them hauled fourteen carriages carrying some five hundred passengers out of Bori Bunder station, Bombay, on the first public passenger railway journey in Asia. What those three locomotives were called — if indeed they were called anything at all — is the question that prompted the research presented here.

It began in 2018, with a question posed to the History and Heritage forums of IRFCA:

"An often-mentioned fact is that the first train between Bombay and Thane in 1853 was hauled by three locomotives named Sindh, Sultan and Sahib, manufactured by the Vulcan Foundry. I was looking through E.L. Ahrons’ The British Steam Railway Locomotive 1825–1925 and noticed an illustration of one of the first 2-4-0 locomotives manufactured by the Vulcan Foundry in 1852 — eight in number — built for main-line duties on the GIPR. Later in the same article, the next set of passenger locomotives supplied to the GIPR are described: Kitson and Co. engines from 1856, also 2-4-0s but with larger cylinders. A picture of one of these, preserved outside Parel workshops, names the locomotive Sindh. Was this a coincidence — or were the locomotives used on the original runs named differently?"

It is a reasonable question. It is also, as it turns out, a question that unravels something that has become received wisdom about one of the great moments in Indian railway history.

What the Standard Reference Says — or Rather, Doesn’t

The first port of call for any research into Indian locomotive history is Hugh Hughes’ Indian Locomotives. This multi-volume series is the definitive reference for the history of locomotives that worked in India from 1853 through to the 1990s, and one of the things Hughes recorded with particular care was the names that railway companies gave their engines. His entry for the Vulcan Foundry batch of 1852 records no names at all. This was significant. Hughes was not careless about such things. If the three locomotives that opened the GIPR had borne the names Sindh, Sultan, and Sahib, it is difficult to believe he would not have noted them. The absence was the first alarm bell.

What the Newspapers Said

The next step was to go back to the contemporary record: the newspaper coverage of the inaugural run itself. A search of the British Library’s online newspaper archive revealed that virtually every report published in papers across Britain and Ireland drew from a single source — a four-column account in the Bombay Gazette of 18th April 1853. Nowhere in that account, and nowhere in the newspapers that reproduced or paraphrased it, are the locomotives named. The Cork Examiner of 6th June 1853 carried a particularly full account. It is worth noting in passing why an Irish provincial paper devoted such space to the opening of a railway in Bombay: the GIPR’s Traffic Manager and Locomotive Superintendent, a Mr Roche, was a Cork man, and the Examiner was not about to let the occasion pass without due recognition of its native son. Their report follows the Bombay Gazette closely:

"At half past three o’clock in the afternoon a royal salute was fired from the ramparts of Fort St. George, immediately after which the well-filled train, consisting of fourteen first, second and third class carriages, drawn by three locomotive engines, and containing about five hundred persons, started from the terminus at Boree Bunder."

Three locomotive engines. Not three named locomotive engines. The contrast with other coverage of the period is instructive: contemporary newspaper reports about the construction of the line go out of their way to record that the locomotive used in the building work was named Falkland. Names, when they existed, were reported. The silence around the inaugural trio is therefore telling.

What the Histories Say

The contemporary newspaper record is not the only evidence. A survey of the historical literature on the GIPR points in the same direction. The History of GIPR Part 1, published by Central Railways in 1990 and written by S.N. Sharma from the railway’s own contemporary records, gives twenty pages to the events of 16th April 1853. It does not name the locomotives. Between 1926 and 1928, The Locomotive Magazine ran a multi-part history of GIPR engines, compiled with contributions from former Locomotive Superintendents and railway historians, with extensive detail on the origins and subsequent fates of the first batch of GIPR locomotives. No names are recorded for any of them. Further works consulted — J.N. Sahni’s Indian Railways One Hundred Years 1853–1953 (1953), J.N. Westwood’s Railways of India (1975), M.A. Rao’s Indian Railways (1975), I.J. Kerr’s Building the Railways of the Raj (1997), and the guidebooks for the Rail Transport Museum in Delhi and the Mysore Rail Museum — all refer to the number of locomotives, the number of carriages and the date. None gives the locomotives names.

The picture that emerges is consistent: from 1853 through to the mid-1970s, the three engines that opened Indian railways are anonymous.

Where the Names Came From

A 1976 issue of Indian Railways magazine describes Sindh as “one of the early locomotives of the GIPR”. This is almost certainly a reference to the very locomotive that sparked this research: a 2-4-0 engine built by Kitson in 1857. Used by the GIPR until it was sold to the Indian Midland Railway (IMR) in 1887 for use at their Jhansi works, it returned to GIPR ownership in 1900 when the companies merged. It was eventually preserved outside the Chief Engineer’s Offices at Parel—the exact location of the photograph mentioned in the original IRFCA forum query. Crucially, the 1976 magazine article does not connect this locomotive to the inaugural run.

A separate edition that year carries an illustration of GIPR No. 1 (the same image used on a commemorative stamp) and describes it as part of the first batch of locomotives on the Bombay–Thane line, but again without attaching the names Sindh, Sultan or Sahib to the inaugural trio.

The first reference this research could find to the three locomotives being specifically named in connection with the first run appears in a 1988–89 edition of Indian Railways magazine. From there, the claim found its way into wider print. Bill Aitken’s 1994 book Exploring Indian Railways states matter-of-factly:

"Though it is customary to date the beginning of Indian Railways from 15.35 hrs on 16 April 1853 — as three locomotives, Sindh, Sultan and Sahib hauled 14 coaches out of Bori Bunder..."

Around the same time, the Limca Book of Records was repeating the same claim. From there it entered the bloodstream of popular history. Almost every account written after 1988 states as established fact that India’s first train was hauled by three locomotives named Sindh, Sultan and Sahib. The earliest reference located during this research appears in Indian Railways publications of the late 1980s, suggesting that the association may have entered popular circulation through official railway publicity at that time.

The Names Themselves Are the Problem

Beyond the absence of documentary evidence, there is a second line of argument: the names themselves are implausible, and in at least one case betray a distinctly modern origin.

Take Sindh first. While the spelling "Sindh" appeared in scholarly geographic texts as early as the late 18th century, it was absolutely not the official bureaucratic or corporate spelling used in mid-Victorian India. In 1852, the standard British administrative spelling of the province was strictly Scinde—as seen in the Scinde Railway or the Scinde Irregular Horse. A Vulcan Foundry locomotive delivered to the GIPR in 1852 would almost certainly have been officially recorded as Scinde if it were named after the province at all.

Although by the time the Kitson locomotive was photographed at Parel in the 1920s it carried the spelling Sindh, the nameplate was almost certainly not original — any contemporary plate would have reflected the spelling current in 1856. The Sindh spelling visible in the photograph is therefore itself a later development, not evidence that the name was coined in the 1850s.

Sahib presents a different problem. The word simply means sir — it is an honorific, not a proper noun with any independent meaning. Victorian locomotive naming was gloriously inconsistent: the East Indian Railway alone had engines called Navvy, King of Spades, Multum in Parvo, Fairy Queen and Tulip alongside the more expected Jupiter and Undaunted. But even by those eclectic standards, an engine named simply Sahib — a generic courtesy title, colourful only to someone who found the subcontinent exotic — would be an oddity. It has the ring of a name chosen for atmosphere, looking back from a distance, rather than one that emerged from the practical business of running a railway in Bombay.

Sultan is marginally more plausible as a locomotive name — there is a long tradition of naming engines after rulers and martial figures — but paired with the other two it feels like part of a set constructed for atmosphere rather than chosen for any particular reason.

It is also worth noting that if you wanted a geographically relevant S-name for a locomotive operating in Bombay in 1852, the obvious choice would have been Salsette — the island on which Thane itself sits, the very destination of the inaugural run. The absence of that name from the trio is suggestive: it points toward names chosen for their alliterative ring and vaguely Indian atmosphere rather than by anyone thinking carefully about the route or the period.

This also resolves the puzzle that prompted the original question. The Kitson locomotive preserved at Parel and named Sindh was from the 1856 batch — the second generation of GIPR passenger engines. A plausible theory is that whoever coined the three names in the 1980s encountered the Parel photograph, or a reference to it, and worked backwards — constructing a set of names that would give the inaugural trio a suitably stirring identity. The Kitson Sindh may have provided the seed for a set of names retrospectively attached to the inaugural locomotives.

Does It Matter?

In one sense, no. The names have become part of a story that people feel affection for. Sindh, Sultan and Sahib have a satisfying alliterative ring, and they have now been repeated so many thousands of times that dislodging them from popular history would be a Sisyphean task.

But for historians — and particularly for railway historians — it matters considerably. The evidence is substantial and points one way: the attribution of the names Sindh, Sultan and Sahib to the inaugural locomotives appears to be a late twentieth-century development rather than a contemporary fact. The names themselves are anachronistic and implausible. And the earliest appearance of the story located during this research is in an Indian Railways publication of the late 1980s.

The point of this article is not to expunge Sindh, Sultan and Sahib from popular memory. It is the more modest one of setting the record straight for those who want to know what actually happened.