As the Bandra Terminus-New Bhuj Express chugged out of Bandra Terminus on Friday, the passengers heading for New Bhuj turned nostalgic. The train was completing 25 years of service that has helped the Kutchi community— a small but powerful community in the city— to connect to their roots. As many as 200 regular passengers had gathered to decorate the train with garlands and felicitate the driver and motormen on the occasion.

For many people, who work in Mumbai, long distance trains are more than a mode of transport. For them, it is like an umbilical cord that connects them with their hometowns. For instance, passengers are emotionally attached with trains like Mumbai-Pune Deccan Queen (started in 1930), Flying Rani that plies between Mumbai and Surat (introduced in 1906) and Bandra Terminus-New Bhuj Express, the Queen of Kutch.

“On April 16,1953, when the Indian Railways celebrated 100 years of completion of its first train in the country, it introduced a Rs 30-pass. After availing oneself of this pass, one could go on an unlimited journey between any two destinations from April 1 to 16 that year. Those days, there was no direct train to Kutch. In 1970, we approached railways to start a train to Kutch. The initiative got a shot in the arm after the formation of the Kutch Passengers Association,” said Shyam Shah, a Kutch businessmen based in Mumbai who founded the association in 1971.

Their work bore fruit after the government introduced the Mumbai Central-Gandhidham Express on October 2, 1984. The train was flagged by Vasantdada Patil, the then Chief Minister of Maharashtra, at Bombay Central station at a function presided over by former Railway Board chairman KTV Raghavan. When the train was flagged off, it was the culmination of a 14-year struggle by a group of Kutchis under the banner of Kutch Passengers Association.

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