I left the office a bit early on Friday to catch an overnight train from Bangalore to Ernakulam / Cochin, on the Kerala coast. Bangalore City Rail station is quite a busy place, co-located with both the long distance bus terminal and the city bus terminal, in an area known as Majestic. The train station itself seems vast, and not well marked, but lucky for me my friends from the office came along to see me off, and make sure I didn’t get lost in the station.
If you can find the right platform (there are 10), the train itself is well marked with which car, or “bogie” as they’re called here, is which. I was traveling in the “air-conditioned sleeper” car. For this class, the name and age of everyone booked for the car is posted on a printout at the door, and you can’t get into the car from the adjacent cars. I was a few minutes early, so while we were waiting, my buddies made sure I was well-laden with bananas and potato chips for the trip.
The train left about 20 minutes late, shortly after 7pm. I’d been looking forward to a train ride since my last visit in 2006, and now I was finally doing it! My seat-mates were three young guys, recent MBA graduates, who all work for the same bank chain in Mysore and Bangalore, off to a “relationship banking” conference in Cochin (Kochi), which is adjacent to Ernakulam.
There wasn’t much to see out the window, as the sun goes down at 6:30pm, and the windows were heavily tinted. So, I just enjoyed the trip. Check out the amenities.
The trip is 624 km and 11.5 hours according to Indian Rail, with 16 stops. This is referred to as the Express train. The train actually started out in the opposite direction you’d expect, heading east to Kuppam in Andhra Pradesh before cutting south through Tamil Nadu and then southwest to Thrisur on the Kerala coast, and south to Ernakulam. There’s a detailed map on Indian Railway’s site. I didn’t realize how circuitous the route was until the next morning when I noticed my mobile phone company had sent me SMSes welcoming me to Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.
An attendant distributed a sheet, blanket, and a pillow shortly after we had left Bangalore. The unofficial meal service is a guy who comes around selling boxes of spiced rice with a hard-boiled egg in the middle, which I declined in favour of my chips and bananas.
Around 10pm, we all went to bed. The seat benches fold down to expose the sleeping pads for the lower berths (I had a lower berth), and a curtain closes off each group of two lowers and two uppers from the light of the corridor and the two berths on the other side of the corridor. Sound carries pretty well, but overall it was a reasonably quiet ride, just the occasional train whistle, squealing brakes, or sleepless child. I didn’t sleep much, probably more because I didn’t want to miss any of the trip than due to the hard sleeping surface or sounds.
Still, I did sleep for a while, awakened by the attendant coming around at 6am. We then had about half an hour to freshen up before arriving in Ernakulam. Ernakulam station isn’t nearly as big as Bangalore’s, so it wasn’t much trouble to find my way out and locate my ride.
Very interesting Gord. Vanessa and I did a couple of overnight trips during our trip to Europe last September. We had an overnight from Frankfurt to Prague, and again from Prague to Budapest. The first trip we slept like babies, but the 2nd trip sounded more like your experience! It is a lot of fun!