Google onboard India’s first passenger train journey

Zee Media Bureau

New Delhi: Google on Tuesday marked the 160th anniversary of the first passenger train journey in India with a doodle on its homepage. The search engine giant takes its visitors on a short journey into the history of Indian Railways, with a train pulled by a steam engine along the palm-lined railway track. The first `O` of Google depicts the front part of the steam engine of the passenger train. On April 16, 1853, the first commercial passenger train chugged out of Bori Bunder, in Bombay to Thane, covering a distance of 34 kilometres. The train was hauled by three locomotives, Sahib, Sindh, and Sultan. Though the history of rail transportation in India goes back to 1832, it was only in 1853-54 that that first passenger train service was launched by two railway companies, Great Indian Peninsular Railway (GIPR) and East Indian Railway (EIR). However, the first train for localised hauling of canal construction material become operational on December 22, 1851 in Roorkee. India has the 4th largest railway network in the world.