And then, as now, the move attracted controversy. The Board of Control for India vehemently opposed the guarantee. But conditions in the colonies had left Her Majesty with no choice but to offer the guarantee, if capital was to be wooed. Also the East India Company needed to evacuate from India's hinterland - jute and cotton to feed the insatiable appetite of mills in Liverpool.

Among the first to sign such a guarantee were the East Indian Railway and the Great Indian Peninsular Railway, the latter better known today as the Central Railway. The Peninsular Railway decided to concentrate on cotton in the west, and the East Indian Railway on jute. Quick to recognise conditions in India, they had chosen to concentrate onfreight. As the earliest feasibility report said, "instead of a dense and wealthy population, the people of India are poor and scattered over vast tracts of land...but it abounds in valuable products which have been deprived of a profitable market for lack of expeditious transport." One hundred and fifty years, things have remained much the same. These two railway were the pioneers. They had to take the good with the bad. The East Indian Railway, halfway through construction, discovered that it was entering enemy territory - that of the Dutch near Chandrapore. The route had to be abandoned and the new one, which went around the Dutchman's turf threw the estimates, and viability completely out of gear. Indian royalty were the next to build railways.

Scindia, the Maharaja of Gwalior and the Gaekwar of Baroda were the first to have their own railway.(So enamoured was the Scindia of the railway, that among the family heirlooms is a mechanical toy train made of the finest crystal. It is often rolled out forforeign documentary film makers.) Several others followed and by 1890, they had between them 873 kms in a 9,325 km network.

As entire cities vanished in the famines between 1874-78, much of the blame was put in inadequate transport facilities to move foodgrains. The state started investing heavily and within a couple of years had 3,000 kms under construction. With so many players in the game, the network began to look like an unholy mess. The country was strung together by several gauges and incompatible operating technologies to an extent that it was no network. The debate on a single system became the precursor to nationalisation. Also, under the guaranteed return policy, the British government was paying out huge sums of money to unprofitable railway. BY 1989, the railways had a combined loss of Rs 58 crore.