Fairy Queen of the rails

In 1837, Victor Hugo wrote a mournful letter to a friend about how going anywhere by train made it impossible to actually see the countryside you were travelling through &ldquoThe flowers by the side of the road are no longer flowers but flecks, or rather streaks, of red and white there are no longer any points, everything becomes a streak...&rdquo

But we human beings are quick to adapt. By 1885, the steam-fuelled journey that Hugo found so impossibly fast had already become a certified way of looking at the landscape. Robert Louis Stevenson immortalised the experience of seeing the countryside unfurl as a succession of tableaux, in his From a Railway Carriage, a poem whose tempo perfectly reproduces the steady rhythm of the train itself &ldquo...Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,/ All by himself and gathering brambles/Here is a tramp who stands and gazes/ And here is the green for stringing the daisies/ Here is a cart runaway in the road/ Lumping along with man and load/ And here is a mill, and there is a river/ Each a glimpse and gone forever&rdquo

By the time I took the Fairy Queen from Delhi Cantonment to Alwar in 2002, this steam locomotive, with a maximum speed of 40km per hour, felt impossibly slow. But slowness was what I had come in search of. Standing out on the engine, next to the driver and his coal-shovelling assistants, I could see everything we passed with a clarity that no Rajdhani journey had ever provided the vivid yellow of a girl&rsquos odhni, the piles of onions being sorted by the roadside, even faces in the curious crowds that gathered to see our quaint contraption trundle by.

Built in Leeds by Kitson, Thompson & Hewitson in 1855, the Queen was probably fast enough in the 50-plus years she ran on the Howrah-Raniganj line of the Eastern Indian Railway. In 1971, she became the first exhibit of the National Rail Museum, in whose grassy environs she stayed parked until 1996, when she was given a makeover by the Perambur workshop of the Southern Railway. The little green engine now tows a 60-seater passenger car on a seven-hour, 143km journey from Delhi to Alwar, on weekends between October and March. As the world&rsquos oldest functioning locomotive (certified by the Guinness Book of World Records), the Queen is now, as the Rail Museum website puts it, &ldquoa living legend, much older than the Titanic&rdquo.

When she&rsquos not chugging along, devouring vast quantities of coal (250kg per kilometre), you can find the Queen at Delhi&rsquos Rail Museum, where her now gleaming exterior seems almost out of place amidst the general air of 1970s torpor, the peeling black and white photos of Khrushchev&rsquos visit to Chittaranjan. Then you read the faded orange sign that begins, &ldquoWe must innovate. We must constantly improve. Today&rsquos...powerful and sleek locomotives hurtle along the countryside faster than ever before...&rdquo You can almost hear the Queen chuckle.

The information

The Fairy Queen is at the National Rail Museum, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi (Tel 26881816/26880939, www.delhitourism.gov.in/delhitourism/entertainment/national_rail_museum.jsp 9.30am-5.30pm, Tues-Sun). The Fairy Queen engine was replaced recently by another steam locomotive and the tour has now been renamed Steam Express Tour (every second and fourth Saturday morning from New Delhi to Alwar Rs 12,375 (adult) and Rs 6,325 (child) for an overnight trip www.royalindiantrains.com/fairy-queen.html).