Pune-Mumbai Train Journey

Last week I decided to take the Pune-Mumbai Indrayani Express as against a Volvo bus that I normally did. And it proved to be such a welcome decision.

I travel to Pune every week for an assignment I have there. I take an early morning bus on Thursday and return either by the evening bus on Friday or the early morning bus on Saturday. Four weeks into my assignment and the closed cold confines of the bus was suffocating me. The same crowded streets, the barren, flat, inanimate landscape of the expressway was becoming predictable and monotonous. I needed to change my mode of transport before I lost interest in my assignment. But with the fast multilane expressway and the convenience of the bus, which would pick me up from close to home and drop me right where I wanted, was there truly another alternative. Yes there was an alternative, which I had used very often several years ago; an alternative quite forgotten nowadays but whose charms still linger in the recesses of my memory.

The train! There was a time when traveling by train between Pune and Mumbai ruled. It was before the expressway came along. Till then it was the quickest way to commute between the two cities, if you discounted flying. And then there were the beautiful lush green post monsoon hills, as the trains wound around the Western Ghats as they crossed over, the salubrious weather when one reaches Lonavla and the monkeys that fearlessly roam the tracks waiting for handouts of food from passengers. There was the constant stream of hot food; thick juicy omelets, hot and crunchy cheese toasts, spicy wada-pav and delicious cutlets and an assortment of other snacks; the Parsi Dairy Kulfi, the Lonavla chikki.

I decided that I would definitely make one Pune-Mumbai journey by train even if meant that I would need to get down at Dadar and take back a crowded local to get to Andheri and home. So I booked myself on the evening Indrayani Express.

So Friday, 26th August saw me on platform 2 at the Pune Railway Station. The nostalgia of a railway station was itself worth my decision to travel by train, the people, the smells and the sounds, all which are entirely unique to Indian Railway stations.

On the train I soaked in the luxury of large seats and the freedom to walk down the aisle, into other compartments, stand at the door and feel the wind on your face as the train hurtles from Pune to Mumbai, passing through familiar stations of ShivajiNagar, Khadki, Dapodi, Pimpri, Chinchwad, Talegaon, Lonavla, Khandala, Karjat and the then the stations of Mumbai. I had already eaten before getting on board and hence regretfully gave a miss to the omelet, cheese toast and cutlet. But at Lonavla the temptation of a hot wada-pav was too much and I bit in.

I regret taking the Indrayani though and wish I had taken a train at a different time. A little out of Pune and it was already too dark for me to enjoy the rolling plains and the green hills.

We reached Dadar fifteen minutes behind schedule. The journey back home via Andheri took one-third the time that I took to reach Dadar from Pune. But yet the journey was wonderful and I had in the short time relived several such journeys I had made both alone and with company.


But would I do this journey again? I don’t think I shall attempt it again for some time. The reason is very simple. Convenience. I would rather have the freedom to be able to catch a bus at a time suitable to me rather than work my schedule around that of the train. Also, the fact that I can catch the bus from and be dropped off at Andheri wins over by a large margin the travel from Dadar to Andheri. But I shall definitely do the Pune-Mumbai train journey once again, in the morning hours, only to take in the hills and the plains.