The toy train to Shimla, and the summer capital it served

For roughly a hundred days a year during the period of British rule in India, the government of the day did not sit in Calcutta or, later, Delhi. It sat in Shimla, a hill town in the western Himalayan foothills chosen, quite simply, because the plains in summer were unbearable and the hills were not. Viceroys, secretaries and entire departments of the civil service relocated there annually from the 1860s onward, along with their paperwork, a migration that turned a modest hill settlement into what was, for part of each year, the effective capital of British India.

A railway built for a climate problem

Getting a government uphill every summer eventually demanded better infrastructure than a mountain road could provide, and the Kalka–Shimla Railway was the result: a narrow-gauge line opened in 1903, climbing roughly ninety-six kilometres from the plains at Kalka to Shimla's ridge-top station, through more than a hundred tunnels and over more than eight hundred bridges, gaining nearly one and a half kilometres of altitude in the process. It is now recognised by UNESCO as part of the Mountain Railways of India, alongside the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway and the Nilgiri line further south, three lines built for broadly the same reason: to move colonial administration and its supplies up into hill stations designed to escape the heat below.

Building it was a considerable engineering undertaking for its period. Surveyors first proposed a route in the 1840s, but construction did not begin until the 1890s, and the line took the better part of a decade to complete, much of the tunnelling done by hand through sedimentary rock that proved considerably harder to work than early estimates allowed for. Barog, roughly halfway along the route, is named after the British engineer who oversaw its longest tunnel, a section that, according to local accounts, cost him his position after an early alignment error, and whose grave sits close to the station that bears his name.

What the ride actually shows you

The train itself is unhurried by design, its narrow gauge and tight curves ruling out speed in favour of a slow, winding ascent through pine forest, with the plains dropping steadily away behind. It is the kind of railway that rewards patience rather than punishing it: the views improve with altitude, and the tunnels, cut by hand through the hillside more than a century ago, are as much a part of the journey as the scenery between them. Modern connections to Shimla generally begin with the Shatabdi Express from Delhi to Kalka, a considerably faster broad-gauge service, before transferring to the narrow-gauge line for the final, and more memorable, stretch. Several stations along the route, among them Barog and Solan, sit surrounded by little more than pine forest and a scattering of tea stalls, and the line's toy-train carriages, small enough to give every seat a window view, remain in regular daily use for local commuters as well as visitors.

Shimla itself

The town that grew up around this seasonal government retains a good deal of the architecture that arrived with it: mock-Tudor buildings, a church modelled on English parish design, and a promenade called the Mall that was, for decades, off-limits to Indian residents outside the colonial administration, a detail worth knowing alongside the more appealing ones. Shimla today is a working Himachal Pradesh hill town in its own right, with a mixed legacy that includes both a striking hill-station streetscape and a history of exclusion that shaped who was allowed to enjoy it. Dharamsala, further along some itineraries, carries a different and more recent history again, as the seat of the Tibetan government in exile since 1960.

When to take it

The railway runs year-round, but the more comfortable months for the journey and for walking around Shimla afterwards are October and November, after the monsoon has cleared, and March and April, before the plains below begin to bake. Winter brings the possibility of snow on the ridge, which has its own appeal but a shorter list of clear days for the mountain views the railway exists to show off; midsummer, by contrast, is exactly the season the line was built to escape, and Shimla in June is a good deal busier and warmer than its founders intended.