Excerpts from the speech of Prime Minister Shri Jawaharlal Nehru, at the inaugural ceremony of the Northern, North-Eastern and Eastern Railways in New Delhi on 14^th April 1952.

“I remember five years ago or about that time when the question of the then state of the Indian Railways came up repeatedly before us - before the Government, before the Cabinet. It was an obnoxious state, after the war, with our resources depleted, with all kinds of rolling stock and lines sent to Mesopotamia and other distant parts of the world, with no replenishments and no renewals, and with a terrific traffic. In fact, it was a painful experience not only to travel but to see other people travelling. It was hardly conceivable, and I would not have believed it if I had not seen it myself, how many people were jammed in into our third class compartments specially, and to some extent in the other classes also. So far as goods were concerned, I believe mountains of them piled up in our ports, and I remember in Bombay there was an astounding accumulation, and industries suffered, business suffered; it was a scandalous state of affairs that many people whose goods lay there had to pay some kind of demurrage, and yet they could not take them away.

That was the state of affairs about five years ago. Soon after that, some months after that, came the Partition, which involved the sudden overnight break-up of the railway system in the northern and north-eastern parts of India. That was a big blow – a big blow at a time when we were just staggering under the weight of the effects of the war. Immediately after the Partition, in fact contemporaneously with it, came the huge migrations - those millions and millions of refugees coming or going - either from Pakistan to India or from India to Pakistan: a tremendous thing; and nobody who saw that migration either by train or by road or otherwise can every forget that astounding and ghastly picture. Trains not merely full inside, but full to the brim of the roof, on the foot-boards, everywhere-filled with suffering humanity. It was an awful sight.

All this burden fell on our railways just when they were least capable of carrying even their normal burdens. And yet we survived, and the railways survived. And one has only to see them now to see how they have risen and overcome all that multitude of difficulties-not only overcome those problems and difficulties, but built themselves anew-and are functioning now with a large measure of efficiency and punctuality. In the old days-I call them old days although it was only four or five years ago-trains were late by hours and hours, and nobody knew when they would arrive.

It is an astounding and astonishing change that has taken place and I think that we should not only take note of that change, and I hope even our worst critics will note that change but also think of how that change has been brought about and on whom the burden of bringing about that change has lain…. you can well presume the enormous amount of hard work and co-operative hard work that has gone into this business and I think we as a people, we as a Government have every reason to be proud of this work and to congratulate all those connected with our railways for what they have done.”