About two months ago I had gone wandering on a back road on one of my early morning walks and suddenly came upon some old red brick buildings of the Railways. If you were to enter the Dehradun Railway Station from the regular entrance, you would pass into the first platform, a number of rail lines and then you will see another platform. The buildings I am talking about are furthest from the entrance to the Railway Station, apparently built in 1899, well over a 100 years ago.
An abandoned shed (I thought I saw an old board reading, "Coaching Shed") caught my fancy and I spent quite a lot of time looking at it. Built of red brick with two great arched entrances, two engines or coaches could be parked there.
Here are the photos of that shed. I walked in and took a photo from inside and from the far side. It is amazing that this structure is still standing as a tribute to British engineering, long after it has become dysfunctional, like parliamentary democracy in India.
Although as a child we used the railways to go to school and come back, this happened only twice a year and I cant say that it gave us any great familiarity with the rail system. If we have any such familiarity, it is from the "yarns" we heard at night from children of railway engineers or administrative staff who knew all about how you had to build up steam and how you had to keep that fire burning by shovelling more coal. These boys often came to school with glass tubes used as a guage, which became "pea-shooters" using raw "cloggers" or hill guavas as projectiles.
I wandered out of the Railway Station and walked to Prince Chowk. From there I made my way back to our Guest House in Racecourse.
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