Railway ministry launches Rail Heritage Digitisation Project in collaboration with Google

New Delhi: The railway ministry on Friday launched the Rail Heritage Digitisation Project” of Indian Railways in collaboration with Google.

The project is first of its kind to showcase country’s Rail Heritage to National and International audience in an online story-telling platform.

Minister of Railways and Coal, Piyush Goyal has launched it through video-conferencing. The project can be accessed through link:“https://artsandculture.google.com/project/indian-railways”.

“Digitization of rail heritage provides immense opportunity to contextualize artefact and other heritage assets with the stories thus becoming more meaningful to next generation. Digital heritage also removes bottleneck of being physically there and thus providing universal access to the large repository of knowledge,” the railway ministry said in a release.

Piyush Goyal said “Being a 165 year old organisation, the Railways has a lot of material which we need to preserve and leave behind for posterity.”

He added that the Indian Railways has a lot of treasured moments for the world to see how technologies evolved over time. Mumbai has a special place in the Railways, being the first Railway line to be set up in India.

It was way back on 16th April, 1853 when the first train ran between Bori Bunder and Thane. We will be setting up 22 digital screens across different locations in India for showcasing this historic project, the rail minister added.