Picto Diary - 15 December 2019 (1) - National Rail Museum, New Delhi

Above: (late entry) Partition Museum (file image). Amritsar, India. 03 December 2019.

Visited this wonderful new museum in Amritsar, Punjab, on 03 December 2019.

There are some poignant videos showing the post partition violence arising from a forced migration of up to ten million people in 1948, Muslims going north, Hindus going south, across the new border separating Pakistan from India.

Here, I purchased a book, "Jallianwalla Bagh," by Kishwar Desai, sponsored by the museum.

The best known book (if not the best scholarly treatise) on 1948 Indian partition is Larry Collins' and Dominique Lapierre's opus "Freedom at Midnight." I've read it twice.

Above: Drums as engineer at diesel locomotive simulator. National Rail Museum, New Delhi, India. 15 December 2019.

Drums did OK at this, apart from taking a curve at 90 kph and taking out a couple of elephants on the track.

Above: Kids awaiting train ride. National Rail Museum, New Delhi, India. 15 December 2019.

School children await "The Joy Ride," a gasoline engine powered small train which circumnavigated the museum complex.

Above: Rajputna Malwa Railway F 734 locomotive. National Rail Museum, New Delhi, India. 15 December 2019.

First locomotive built in India. 1895. Ajmer workshop.

Our Indian train experience is not nothing. TIMDT, FeeBee, and Mwah (sic) ride in a luxury sleeper compartment on the Rajdhani Express, from Delhi to Calcutta in 1973. In 2016, TIMDT and Mwah (sic) trained from Sawai Madhopur, the city adjacent to Ranthambore National Park, in Rajasthan, to Delhi. On this trip, Drums, TIMDT and Mwah (sic) went by rail from Varanasi to Lucknow.

Indian train stations are one of the best places to see the whole range of Indian population, rich/poor, drab/colorful, young/old.

Indian Railways (IR) is India's national railway system operated by the Ministry of Railways. It manages the fourth largest railway network in the world by size, with a route length of 67,368-kilometre (41,861 mi) and total track length of 121,407-kilometre (75,439 mi) as of March 2017.