Mountain Railways of India
The site includes three railways. The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway was the first mountain passenger railway and remains the most outstanding example. Opened in 1881, its design employed bold and ingenious engineering solutions to the problem of establishing an effective rail connection in a scenic mountainous region. The Nilgiri Mountain Railway is a 46 km long, metre gauge, single track railway in Tamil Nadu, first proposed in 1854, but due to the difficult mountainous location, construction only began in 1891 and was completed in 1908. The railway, which runs from 326 m to 2,203 m above sea level, represented the latest technology of its time. The Kalka Shimla Railway is a 96 km long, single track railway built in the mid-19th century to serve the highland town of Shimla and is a symbol of the technical and material efforts to evacuate the mountain population by rail. All three railways are still fully operational.