The Khyber Steam Safari: Ken Gibbs

by Ken Gibbs

Social stratification exists in most cultures, and as a child of a mother who instilled in me the need to use the correct vocabulary lest I be taken for – horrors ! – someone from a socially different class, I was given codes to identify what was right and proper so that I would always know my place. Mother kept a quiver full of acronyms for our guidance in this.

One of those acronyms was TWW – Tremendously Worth While – indicating which would bring praise for being done. Like helping an older person across the road where no pelican crossing was available; like opening a door for ‘a lady’; like getting up off one’s chair when an older person entered the room. Or even for doing something that was interesting.

Early Departure

Acronyms aside – we had far too many of them in the UN, many of which were pretty meaningless anyway – I found myself in Peshawar with one day to spare on which I could explore for something, well, TWW. I found it, booked a seat, and reported next morning at the appropriate railway station for the Khyber Steam Safari.

Here, I found myself the only ‘foreigner’ – all the rest appeared to be Pakistani who were curious about travelling on a steam train from an earlier age. Mother would have said that I should ‘mind my Ps and Qs’ as I was seriously outnumbered and the Raj no longer operated. What mother would also have noticed was that the train left on time – to the second – and that British Rail could learn from this. We left the station, slowly, in clouds of steam and smuts and very shortly we stopped, apparently in the middle of nowhere. Actually, it was at the boundary of the airport where the railway lines cross the main runway, so that the engine driver has to obey air traffic control which tells him when he can cross without being run over by a Boeing 747. Useful information.

For anyone sufficiently interested in the route to the top of the Khyber Pass, please consult Wikipedia and ‘Khyber Train Safari’ as most of the details are included there. For train enthusiasts, this journey was ‘a must’. Two engines and four coaches in a push-you-pull-me configuration to allow steep climbs to be achieved without any loops; vistas to die for; and a stop to allow a military bagpipe band to entertain the passengers on an isolated station platform in the middle of a semi-desert. This I found very curious as I didn’t think that the bagpipes were indigenous to the Indian sub-continent. Perhaps they were stolen from the British in Kabul when they were wiped out – almost to a man - in 1842?

Serenaded by bagpipes at Jamrud

Arriving at the top of the Khyber Pass at Landi Kotal, there were a wealth of sights to see especially as it is a Cantonment with a rich history. From this elevated position on a specially constructed viewing platform close to the Michni Fort, one can look down the winding Khyber Pass to the Torkham Gate into Afghanistan, and a short lecture is given by one of the military, an impeccably turned out Pathan – speaking English no doubt honed at Sandhurst Military Academy in England – about the area. As the Pathans were the scourge of the British Army in the days of the Raj, we could see that this cantonment is now in safe hands. It is claimed – but incorrectly so – that the last survivor of the 1842 rebellion against the British in Kabul, arrived at this point to report on the disaster. Colourful for the tourists, perhaps?

I stood at the back to listen to the commentary while the Major was using his swagger-stick to point to some features on a concrete, suitably painted model of the area at his feet. The mountains on the model were exactly what we could see from this vantage point. The Major was using numbers to identify individual mountain tops which mystified me until someone quietly pointed out to me that the numbers were also ‘painted’ on the mountains themselves ! Somebody must have marched his sepoys to each one with adequate quantities of paint to paint them so. This reminded me of the nursery rhyme which ran something like this:

The grand old Duke of York, He had ten thousand men

He marched up to the top of the hill, And he marched them down again.

It flashed through my mind that Rudyard Kipling who wrote about this area, would have had fun composing something along the lines of ‘The Raj Riposte’ for this tourist lecture.

View towards the Torkham Gate from the Michni Post Viewing Platform

*****

Very sadly, following the catastrophic rain and floods of 2006 when parts of the railway line were washed away, it has not been repaired despite the tourist potential. Thus this account is historic.
In 2015, the replacement of the Khyber Steam Safari was renamed the Khyber Train Safari and it now travels from Peshawar to Attock Khurd in an easterly direction towards Rawalpindi taking tourists away from the Khyber Pass itself. Most recent events with the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban have made the Khyber Pass a highly sensitive and No-Go area for all bar the desperate or foolhardy.

The Khyber Steam Safari was required to wait at the airport boundary until Air Traffic Control let them pass to avoid a plane-train crash. Very sensible.

I thought that this was possibly the only place where aircraft had to compete with land vehicles, but it appears that I was wrong. See the attached which shows how Gibraltar handles things.

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