A narrow-gauge steam-era line squeezes between shopfronts and switchbacks its way up nearly two thousand metres to the tea town of Darjeeling.
The track is barely wider than a garden path — two feet, to be exact — and for long stretches it runs directly down the middle of the Hill Cart Road, so your train shares space with taxis, pedestrians and the occasional cow between New Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling. It has done this since 1881, and UNESCO now protects it as a working World Heritage Site rather than a museum piece.
The signature stretch is the Batasia Loop, where the line spirals over itself to lose height gently enough for the little engines to manage, framing a war memorial with a panorama of Kangchenjunga on a clear morning. Further down, the Agony Point switchback earns its name honestly — the driver reverses the whole train around a hairpin too tight for a normal curve.
Most travellers ride the shorter joyride service from Darjeeling to Ghum, the highest railway station in India, rather than the full seven-hour haul from the plains — it's enough to get the tea-garden views, the diesel-and-steam smell of the old locomotives, and the strange intimacy of a train passing so close to shopfronts you could touch the awnings.
Book the steam-hauled joyride specifically if you can; several services now run modern diesel units instead, which move faster but lose the theatre. Bring a scarf even in summer — Darjeeling sits high enough that mornings stay properly cold.
