The ghost who spooked trains

The Railways are the life line of India. Railway lines crisscrosses the length and breadth of our country and several lakhs people are employed in  this behemoth.

They play a crucial role in the economy of the country. It is one of the world's largest railway networks comprising 115,000 km (71,000 miles) of track over a route of 65,000 km (40,000 miles) with 7,510 stations.

As of December 2012, Indian Railways had transported over 25 million passengers daily (over 9 billion annually). In 2011, the railways ferried over 8,900 million passengers annually or more than 24 million passengers daily and 2.8 million tons of freight daily.

Naturally, there are many legends and myths about the Railways. There have been legion number of stories about marriages being brokered in railway compartments, friendships being forged, children being born, trains coming late by a day or more, passengers travelling on roof tops and many more similar stories.

However, there is nothing to beat this story and even by Indian Railway standards it is a classic act, hard to beat, harder to believe and even harder to digest.

This story is about a railway station. Yes, a railway station which was supposedly so haunted that it remained closed for decades and no trains stopped by. The trains whizzed past the desolate station and some fearful and superstitious passengers even downed shutters of the windows to avoid looking at the haunted station.

This is the story of the Begunkodor railway station. Located in Puralia district of West Bengal, the haunted station is 46 kilometres away from the town of Purulia.

Unbelievably, the railway station at Begunkodor remained closed for 42 years. The reason was that the station was believed to be haunted by as spook and no employee was willing to serve or take a posting at the station.  The station remained only in name from 1962 to 2009.

Locals claim that a railway employee died after he witnessed a female apparition in the station in 1967. Soon, this tale spread and railway employees initially took leave and then sought transfers. None were willing to work at the station and within a few weeks, the station became deserted. Soon, no trains stopped and the station stopped receiving trains.

In no time, stories about the female ghost gained credence. The phantom woman would sometimes dance on the platform and on occasion take a walk along the tracks. The railway employees feared that she would come back to life and they expressed no desire to work at the station.

As the legend of the white saree apparition grew, the station fell deeper and deeper into disuse and soon no locals gathered courage to visit the station.

The first ray of hope of opening the station came when Mamta Banerjee was the Railway Minister. When she was told about the haunted station, she curtly remarked that she did not believe in ghosts. “It is all manmade”, she declared and ordered the Railways to take steps to reopen the now defunct station. This was in 2009.

Meanwhile, Basudeb Acharya, former chairman of the Parliament’s Standing Committee on Railways claimed that the ghost story was cooked up by railway staff  to avoid their posting at a remote location.

The railway station was reopened on September 3, 2009 when the Ranchi-Hatia Express stopped at Begunkodor, the first train to do so, in 42 years.

Begunkodor is 260 kilometres or 161 miles from Kolkata. The reopening was a red letter day for the locals who danced and sang with joy. Hundreds turned up to watch the first train in more than four decades pull to a slow and grinding stop at the station.  

However, the fear of the ghosts still persists. Even two years after the re- opening of the Begunkodor station, Dalu Mahato, a private ticket- selling agent, is the sole worker there. He is given a commission for each ticket he sells. Mahato too makes it point to leave when the sun is still shining. You can rarely find him after 6 p.m.

For passengers, they are still greeted with empty ticket counters, no station master, ticket checker or any other employee. You see, the ghost still instills fear and such is its tentacles that people rarely dare to go to the station on their own.

The tea museums of India

There are a variety of museums relating to a wide spectrum of  topics right from history, geography, folk art, folk dolls, dance, drama, music, literature, automobiles and what not.

But this museum should surely take the cake for it is one of its kind in India and certainly a rarity even in this age. This is the Tea Museum in Kerala and it is located in a tea estate in Munnar, which is one of the most beautiful spots in God’s own country as Kerala is called.

The museum was started by Tata Tea, which is one of the most recognized brands in India. Since the Tata group was one of the pioneers of tea cultivation in Munnar, it thought it fit to start a museum in its estate in Munnar.       

It is called the Tata Tea Museum and it is a connoisseur’s delight as it can give you a history of tea and the phases of development that it underwent over the last few decades.

The museum is in the Nallathanni Estate and it chronociles the beginning of tea plantation, the equipments used then and the brands of tea that have emerged from the estate.

The highlight of the museum should be a rare sundial which is placed on a granite bock. This beautiful device was crafted in 1913 by the Art Industrial School at Nazareth, Tamil Nadu.

Another exhibit which attracts attention is a original tea roller called the Rotorvane. The device was manufactured in 1905 and was used for CTC type tea processing.

CTC means “Crush, Tear, and Curl” and also “Cut, Twist and  Curl”  and it is a method of processing black tea. In this process, the tea leaves are passed through a series of cylindrical rollers with hundreds of small sharp “teeth” that crush, tear, and curl the tea.

Apart from this CTC, there is a “Pelton Wheel” widely used in  power generation plant that existed in Kanniamallay estate in the 1920s. The Kanniamallay estate was part of a series of estates in Munnar that Tatas named as Kannan Devan tea estates

Another exhibit that will captivate visitors is the rail engine of the Kundale Valley Light Railway, which carried men and material between Munnar and Top Station during 1900s.

There are a few exhibits that do not relate to tea but were found in the Tea estates such as a burial urn dating back from the second century BC. The urn was discovered near Periakanal estate.

The museum also has a section exhibiting classic bungalow furniture, typewriters, wooden bathtub, magneto phone, iron oven, manual calculators and even an EPABX or telephone exchange of the 1909 telephone system.

The best place in the museum is the demonstration room for tea tasting.  It is here that we come across varieties of tea. Visitors are also made aware of  various stages of processing tea and even preparing black tea.

The museum is open on all days of the week and there is a en entrance fee.

Munnar is a hill station in Idukki district in Kerala. It is situated at the confluence of three rivers-Mudrapuzha, Nallathanni and Kundala.

Munnar is part of the Annamalai Ranges, with south India's highest peak Anamudi. Munnar easily accessible by road. The nearest airports are Nedumbassery in Kochi, Kovai in Coimbatore and Madurai. It is hardly four hours by road from these places. The nearest railway stations are Alwaye,  Ernakulam, Madurai and Coimbatore.

Another  tea museum is at Dodabetta in Coonoor, Tamil Nadu. It was opened in 2005 and covers an area of once acre.

The museum has three sections:Origin of World tea, Tea history in India and finally Evolution of Tea in the Nilgiris. You can also check out facts on how tea as a beverage is made and how it is traded.

However, the credit for the tea museum at the highest point in India is at Darjeeling, West Bengal. This is described as India’s first  working tea museum and it is located at a height of  6,800 feet at the foothills of Himalayas.

The museum is at the Happy Valley Tea Estate in the fringes of Darjeeling town on Wednesday. Assam is also planning on a tea museum at its capital of Gawhati.

India has a long history of tea cultivation. It began in the 1820 when the East India Company commenced tea cultivation in Assam. Today, India is one of the largest tea producers in the world, though over seventy per cent of the tea is consumed within India itself.

India is listed as the world’s leading producer, its 715,000 tons well ahead of China’s 540,000 tons. However, because Indians average half a cup daily on per capita basis,  70 per cent of India's immense crop is consumed locally.