Published: Civil and Military Gazette, 18 July 1887.

Attribution: In Scrapbook 3 (28/3, p. 133).

Text: Civil and Military Gazette.

Notes: Unrecorded and unreprinted. Complaints about the Indian rail system were endemic. From Bombay, Lahore was served by the Rajputana Line, about which RK wrote a few days after this item: We are told that the damage [to the line at Ajmere] consisted only of the ‘washing away in two places of a few yards of ballast’. Nevertheless,

It was growing monotonous, and His Excellency began to complain. The Easily Interfered-with, the Gone Immediately Phut, and the Burat Bund and Cracked Irrigation-cut Railways, had split themselves into half-mile lengths, and were swimming about their respective provinces like dominoes in a puddle. The Not Worth Running Railway shut up all its bridges with a click, and retired from business after the first five inches were recorded. As long as the papers could struggle on without any Home news or exchanges, they said that the interruption to traffic was very serious, but they had no doubt that the zeal and energy of the nearest C.I.E. would mend matters shortly.

Then the telegraph-posts began to fall out of the hill-sides like old teeth; all the Simla communications were interrupted. No one knew what His Excellency was saying or thinking, for there was a mile and a half of raving, roaring Gugger between the nearest Telegraph-Engineer and the first broken telegraph-post. The Council were shut up with His Excellency, and Naini Tal was cut off from Allahabad.

The newspapers led a hand-to-mouth existence for another fortnight, on fragments of old reports, and then they went out – reluctantly and apologetically – one by one. The True Briton, Last Week's Information and the Politician vowed that, if the Government had stayed in Calcutta, this abnormal monsoon would never have occurred; and the “fatuous folly of a crassly unsympathetic administration was absolutely and solely responsible.” They subsisted on Police Reports and Municipal Meetings for a few days after the others had ceased from troubling.