43 years of glorious service ! A very very Happy Birthday to one of the legends of Calcutta-Bombay route, the "Gitanjali Express" !
On a personal note, this train is not just a train for me ! It's an emotion, nostalgia, one of the love of my life since childhood & what not ! Out of innumerable journeys I have undertaken onboard a train till date, half of them are either on the Gitanjali Express or the Steel Express. My love & admiration for trains & locomotives started from this train...
more... followed by others like Steel, Ispat, etc. As mentioned earlier, there are innumerable journeys & innumerable memories itched in my mind which I still cherish time to time although all are not captured behind an artificial lens.
From red coaches with bulbs to the current blue ICF ones & finally LHB. From being hauled by a TATA WAM 4, colourful SRC WAP 4s in cream & red, ICF Rajdhani scheme or the blue beauties to standard liveried beauties later on & finally a WAP 7. From being a 16-17 coacher with 8 sleepers to a full fledged 24 coach train with 13 sleepers, I have lived every bit of the journey since the day I started recognising this train & the locomotives.
I will share a few instances. This train has a unique hindi announcement at Howrah Junction where instead of saying the numbers separately they express it in terms of thousands & hundreds. "Do hazar athso sath up Howrah Mumbai Gitanjali Express via Bilaspur Nagpur". The " via Bilaspur Nagpur" part was there for few other trains as well but its has been omitted from the announcement since many years. The Ahmedabad Express (2833/34, earlier 8033/34) had an additional word for Tatanagar in its announcement "via Bilaspur Nagpur Tatanagar". My first ever spotting of an offlink was with Gitanjali Express. A WAP 4 with mid recessed headlamp homed by Kanpur (CNB) & fresh from CLW in the then newly introduced standard livery. I remember it was October 2002 during Durga Puja. After I alighted at Tatanagar I was searching for the word Santragachi on the loco but landed upon Kanpur written near the driving cab. Another prominent memory is the shift in it's departure times ! It used to be 12:50 in the far end of 90s & early 2000 , 13:45 in 2002, then it shifted to 13:30 in 2003 which remained for quite a long period. Later the same was changed to 13:50 in 2008 till recent times when it was preponed to 13:40. The Gitanjali used to overtake the Kurla Express (8029/8030) at Panskura regularly. The latter used to depart before 12:50 till 2002. Then onwards at 13:15 from Howrah & later on from Shalimar. By the time Gitanjali completed its scheduled halt at Kharagpur the Kurla Express used to catch up with us mostly powered by a Bhusaval (BSL) WAM 4. The best part was the journey & the priority this train received. The memory I am most fond of is the train flying past the Dalma Range & the intermediate stations between Kharagpur & Tatanagar powered by a customary colourful well maintained SRC WAP 4 beautifully singing it's twin melody running well ahead of schedule on most occasions while the Sun set (almost set in summers) behind the mountains by the time we reached Tatanagar. Many passengers used to describe the ride as an aggresive one like a storm, in Bengali "Jharer bege elo" & in Hindi people mostly used to say "Bahut bhayanak gari h !".
The narration will have no end if I don't stop myself at this point :P. There is much more to say, an infinite list may be ! Apologies if I have bored any of the readers !
