Indian Trains Are Not Much Fun

I have compared the Indian train system to the Chinese train system before, but now I have seen how much worse the Indian system can be. On a Chinese train, you get on. If you are in a seat car, it is one thing and I suppose it can get pretty crowded. But on all the trains in China that I rode, when I was in a sleeper car, hard or soft, there were never more people than sleeping berths. And I was on trains during some of their busy times. It still never happened.

In addition, each train car had a conductor. They would come along and take your ticket. They kept the tickets in a little book. They were responsible for getting you off the train at the correct place. So when your stop was coming up, they would come along with their little ticket book and tap you or wake you up (if it was the middle of the night), and give you your ticket. Then you would know that the next stop was your stop and you got ready and then departed the train.

On my first couple of Indian train rides, that was how it seemed here, too, except that there was no conductor. The passenger was responsible for making sure they got off at the correct stop, even if that was in the middle of the night. For such a large and complex train system, that seemed to be a bit odd to me. I would have thought that they would work it a bit better than that.

On the train journey to Varanasi, however, I discovered that they also don't really give a damn how many people they but into a sleeper car. I would hope it's better in the AC sleepers (higher class and with air conditioning), and that they would control the number of people better, but in just the regular sleeper cars, it doesn't seem to make a difference. So, in the sleeper car I was in, there ended up being twelve people for the eight beds in my section. I'm certain that not all of them had purchased a bed, and it's possible that I could have become rightly unruly and insisted on having my berth to myself without consequence. But I didn't and I ended up squished into a corner trying to sleep with a couple other people sitting on the end of my berth, while there were a couple of others lying on bags and things on the floor. It was a farce. And for a twenty-four plus hour train ride, I was quite uncomfortable and somewhat miserable. At least when sitting, I had the window and had somewhere to lean and rest, with all kinds of stuff on the floor under my feet. I was not impressed. I shall have to evaluate how far I am willing to travel at once on a train from here on out.

But along the way, there was some nice scenery out the windows.