India Original explainer
From a 34 km run in 1853 to about 2 crore passengers a day, how India's vast railway system is run.
For millions of Indians, the day starts with a train. A student catches a local to college, a worker rides an overnight express to another city, and a farmer sends sacks of grain in a goods wagon. Indian Railways is not just a way to travel. It is the system that moves people, food, coal, steel and parcels across a country that is almost as wide as it is long.
It is also one of the largest railway systems in the world under a single management, and the fourth largest national network by size. Running it means keeping thousands of trains, stations, tracks, signals and staff working together every hour of every day, in heat, rain and fog, across deserts, plains, hills and crowded cities.
The story began on 16 April 1853, when India's first passenger train ran from Bombay, now Mumbai, to Thane. The distance was about 34 kilometres. The train had 14 carriages and carried around 400 passengers. It was pulled by three steam locomotives named Sahib, Sindh and Sultan, and the journey took about one hour and fifteen minutes.
At the time, India was under British rule, and the railway was built mainly to move goods and troops and to connect ports with inland towns. Over the decades, the lines spread in every direction. After Independence in 1947, the many separate railway companies were brought together into one national system. In 1951, the network was reorganised into regional zones, a structure that has grown over the years to 18 zones today.
The scale is hard to picture until you put the numbers together. According to the Ministry of Railways, the network spans over 69,000 route kilometres and connects over 8,000 stations. It runs more than 22,000 trains a day in total, including passenger and freight services, and serves about 2 crore passengers a day. It employs over 1.2 million people, making it one of the largest employers in the country.
Those figures hide a lot of variety. In 2023-24, Indian Railways carried 6.905 billion passengers in the year. Some of those journeys were short trips on crowded suburban locals in Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. Others were long journeys of two or three days, such as the Vivek Express from Dibrugarh in Assam to Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu, which covers about 4,200 kilometres.
Indian Railways is run by the Ministry of Railways. Below the ministry, the work is divided into zones, and each zone is divided into divisions. A zone looks after trains, tracks and stations in its region, while a division handles the day-to-day running in a smaller area. This matters because a decision made in Delhi cannot by itself keep a signal working in Bihar or a platform clear in Kerala. Local managers, station masters, drivers, guards and track workers do that work.
Most people think of passenger trains first, and there are many kinds. Suburban locals carry daily commuters in big cities. Mail and express trains connect cities and towns. Rajdhani and Shatabdi trains link major cities with faster, limited-stop services. Vande Bharat Express trains, introduced in 2019, are modern train sets built in India, and 164 Vande Bharat services were running by late 2025. There are also slower passenger trains that stop at small stations, and special trains during festivals and holidays.
Freight is the other half of the story, and it earns much of the money that keeps passenger fares low. Goods trains carry coal to power plants, food grain to ration shops, cement and steel to building sites, and containers to ports. Because freight and passenger trains share many of the same tracks, planners have to fit them together like a puzzle, giving priority to fast passenger trains while still moving goods on time.
Almost all of the main network now runs on electricity. More than 99 per cent of the broad-gauge network, the wide track used for most trains in India, had been electrified by late 2025. Electric locomotives are faster to accelerate, cheaper to run over long distances and cleaner at the point of use than diesel. A small number of diesel locomotives remain for places where electrification is not complete or for shunting and backup work.
The railway is changing in ways passengers can see. More stations are being rebuilt with better waiting areas, lifts, escalators and cleaner platforms. Tickets can be booked online, and live running status can be checked on a phone. Newer trains offer cleaner coaches, better seats and charging points. Behind the scenes, dedicated freight corridors are being built on some routes so that goods trains can run separately from passenger trains, which should make both faster and more reliable.
For all the change, the basic job has stayed the same since 1853: move a huge number of people and a huge amount of goods, safely and affordably, across a very large country. That is why the railway is often called the lifeline of the nation. It is not a single train or a single line. It is a network, and its strength is that it keeps working, day after day, for almost everyone.
This explainer was written by The Daily Short's desk from the sources listed above. It is general information, not professional advice. Spot an error? See our Corrections Policy or tell us via the Contact page and we will correct it. Follow our official Instagram @thedaily.short.