Historical City Level Indian Railways Maps

[Kritarth Jha]

Hi Everyone,

Just writing in case anyone has leads for (preferably high resolution) city-level historical railway maps for Indian Cities. Theoretically, there should be some of these in British Residencies/Libraries scattered all over. Wondering if someone has come across this and digitized it before. 

Ideally what I'm intending to see is how a railway system cuts up cities into neighborhoods if any in prominent Indian Cities. 

Thanks in Advance,
Kritarth

[Arun Ganesh]

Very interesting, a good place to start would be to enquire with the experts at https://www.irfca.org/ if havent done so already, most notably Samit Roychoudhury who has authored the most detailed maps of the railway network, and S Aravind and Deepak Saravanan who have done extensive route research on the network.

 

[Siddhant N]

Here's the data <- https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20101199

+ read the seminal paper to mine out a bunch of useful refs.

Siddhant Nowlakha

[Kritarth Jha]

Thanks so much for this! I've ordered the book and asked the IRFCA forums for more info on this. 
Much Appreciated! I'll update this thread with links to maps if do end up finding them!

[Kritarth Jha]

Ah yes! This paper is really cool! However i haven't been able to find the actual map images on this. It does seem like a lot of this data comes from the source "History of Indian Railways, Constructed and in Progress (1918 and 1966 volumes)"  but i don't know where to access/buy these.  I've asked IRFCA regarding the same too, i'll keep this thread updated if I find the maps.

[Arun Ganesh]

Also sharing a detailed map of all railways in the world extracted from OpenStreetMap data which also includes many historical lines and might be a useful reference to piece together other bits of information you might find. 

View Map

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[Peter Mayer]

Hi Kritharth,

Here's a possible 'work around' at least for major cities. Find an old copy of a guide book like Murray's Handbook to India, Pakistan, Burma & Ceylon. Because they assumed you were travelling by rail, there are maps of major cities with rail lines and stations clearly indicated. Here's a quick photo of Bombay from my 1962 edition.

best wishes,

Peter

[Arun Ganesh]

what I'm intending to see is how a railway system cuts up cities into neighborhoods if any in prominent Indian Cities. 

Coming back to the original question, it would be great to see what you find. Since independence, i cannot recollect any significant network changes in big cities that might have fragmented neighbourhoods since a new line is usually laid on empty land skirting existing settlements.

There are other changes like closure of level crossings, new road and foot over/under bridge and gauge conversions that might have a more significant effect to the mobility of people between two sides of a railway line but may not be so visible on historical maps.

It may make sense to focus on one city to study this for ease of use of data collection, and Mumbai might have the best archival records for doing this. This 1931 guide map of Mumbai is very interesting, you can see the location of all the original settlements in the suburbs before the railways brought about their urbanization. It even shows the CST tramway (now CST Road) before the airport was built at Sahar.

1931 Guide map of Bombay: http://mapwarper.net/maps/29682