The Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) will be signing the ‘death warrant’ of this practice on Friday through an agreement with a public sector undertaking for supplying new ‘antique’ spares to revive a fleet of narrow gauge steam locomotives, also called Iron Sherpas. 

The Guwahati-headquartered NFR controls the 138-year old Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (DHR), popularly called toy train. 

....

But cannibalism and replacement of unusable steam locomotives with diesel variants had a downside. These violated the conditions of conservation the DHR needed to adhere to as one of UNESCO’s prime world heritage sites.

The 78km DHR from West Bengal’s New Jalpaiguri to Darjeeling had earned this tag in 1999. 

Downgrading it could have had a domino effect on the 46km Nilgiri Mountain Railway and the 96km Kalka-Shimla Railway that were later clubbed to form the Mountain Railways of India World Heritage Site.

“We managed to salvage old steam locomotive layouts and manufacturing designs at DHR’s Tindharia (habitation near Kurseong) workshop. Experts from the Ranchi-based Heavy Engineering Corporation Limited (HECL) studied them for almost two years to develop the technology to produce the vintage parts,” an officer of the NFR said, declining to be quoted ahead of the formal inking of the agreement with the PSU.

The DHR, he added, faced the prospect of being dropped from the world heritage site without the steam locomotives giving a feel of the mountain railway system’s old-world charm.

The possibility of DHR’s demotion had made Indian Railways sign a find-in-trust (FIT) agreement with the UNESCO in January this year. The deal entails a comprehensive conservation management plan (CCMP) that the UNESCO will prepare for the DHR on payment of $533,332 in Indian rupees.

The absence of such a plan, clearly defining the role of all stakeholders, for so long was a violation of the conditions that the UN’s cultural agency had set when it declared the DHR a global heritage site in 1999. 

....