THEY SEEM PEDESTRIAN enough, these people. Swinging between work and wants, cares and compulsions, they flit through life at a banal pace. Yet, often enough they chug to a different beat. They track a passion that verges on an obsession, veers through the nation and wheels into ex-istence an unlikely grid. It’s called the Indian Railways Fan Club of America (IRFCA), a worldwide community of railway fans hitched to a website (www.irfca.org), a singu-lar platform to converge at and cap the cu-riosity that strings them together.

With sights trained on all things rail, the members prey on information with a matchless appetite, travelling to innocuous corners of the country to capture the un-known. So, every month or two, beset by an urge beyond their ken, they plan, pack and perch atop trains to repress the rover’s itch, pandering to their preoccupation despite their occupations.

‘‘I’ve travelled to Rameswaram in the south, Jammu in the north, Bhuj in the west and Jalpaiguri in the east,’’ says 31-year-old Vikas Singh, a brand manager with Reckitt Benckiser in Delhi. His secret stimulant is the narrow gauge. ‘‘It’s probably the least re- searched subject. Do you know there’s 2,800 km of narrow gauge track in India?’’ he asks.

Needless to say, he has spanned the stretch in the past five years, about three years after the passion set in. ‘‘It started with an article I read on how the world’s oldest metre gauge line lay at Delhi’s doorstep. So my first trip was the 11 km of metre gauge from Garhi Hasraru (near Gurgaon) to Farukh Nagar,’’ he says.

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