Living la vida Loco

ALINA SEN

TIMES NEWS NETWORK
 
Meet the train gang. Lakshman T, Gautam Parthasarthy and Shashanka Nanda, the trainspotters from Hyderabad who tell us. "Why have boring Aishwarya Rai on your wallpaper when you can choose the Fairy Queen or the WDP4 engine?"

Hyderabad Times comes face to face with a love for trains, which is at once strange as it is fascinating. If you thought railways meant crowded stations, RAC travel and bad coffee, look at how they see it. "Just the wheel of an engine is as high as your shoulders. We're talking about mammoth pieces of machinery, designed to travel over 100 kms per hour, to haul hundreds of tonnes, and yet so accessible to you," says Lakshman. They argue, they debate, they research and then they put up their train of thoughts on the Indian Rail Fan Club Association site, which has 584 members.

To them the railgaadi is much more than just a means of getting from A to B. "The speed, the rush of a Shatabdi doing 100 miles an hour thundering past you, is something that can't be explained," says Gautam, whose first present was a book on trains, followed by a birthday cake in the shape of an engine, "that sort of set it for me," he grins.

Lakshman's love affair with the track machines began with counting bogies of the trains he would watch from the boundary wall of his house. "He's our encyclopedia," says Shashanka who's the speed demon of the group. Taking pictures one foot away from the track when a train comes whistling down at you isn't a very safe thing, so his friends watch out for him when he does.

"The clickety clack of the wheels on the rails, the wind on your face and the rush of technology that's moved from steam, to diesel, to electric make railways such an absorbing study," says Gautam. "Running a railway network of the magnitude we have here is more than huge. And facilities like booking tickets from any counter or getting refunds against cancellation on the same day don't happen even in France with its famed TGV, but we have it," they point out, giving us yet another reason why they revere the railways.

And before they leave to watch the Godavari Express go past the Necklace Road, they tell us the Fairy Queen is the oldest, working broad gauge locomotive in the world with a glass front that allows its passengers a view of how the drivers work the beauty. Now, how can Aishwarya ever hope to compete against that kind of class?

alinasen@indiatimes.com