Indian Railways runs the fourth-largest national railway system in the world: on 31 March 2024 it covered 69,181 km of route, 109,748 km of running track and 135,207 km of total track including sidings, served 7,461 stations, and in the 2023–24 financial year carried 6.905 billion passengers and 1,588 million tonnes of freight. Its lines reach from Baramulla in Kashmir to Kanniyakumari at the southern tip of the peninsula, and from Okha on the Gujarat coast to Dibrugarh in upper Assam. Almost all of it, 96.59%, is laid to the 1,676 mm broad gauge, and by July 2026 99.6% of the broad-gauge route was electrified.
69,181 km of Route and 135,207 km of Track
Railway networks are measured in three ways, and the gaps between them show where traffic is heaviest. Route length (69,181 km) counts each line once. Running track (109,748 km) counts every track a train can run on, so a double-track line counts twice; 31,094 km of Indian routes have two or more tracks. Total trackage (135,207 km) adds sidings, yards and loops. The busiest corridors show why the extra track matters: in July 2020 seven trunk routes totalling 11,295 km were classed as the High-Density Network, and those lines, linking Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Howrah and Guwahati, carried about 60% of all rail traffic.
Gauge is the other number that shapes the map. The railway was built in four gauges: 1,676 mm broad gauge, 1,000 mm metre gauge, and 762 mm and 610 mm narrow gauges. Project Unigauge, a long-term programme, is converting most of the smaller ones, and by March 2024 the split was 66,820 km broad gauge (96.59%), 1,159 km metre gauge (1.68%) and 1,202 km narrow gauge (1.74%). Among the lines still off the broad gauge are the hill railways kept for heritage.
Managing that length takes a large organisation. The network is split into 18 administrative zones and 68 operating divisions, each division headed by a divisional railway manager. In 2024 the railway employed 1.25 million people, which makes it India’s second-largest employer and the ninth-largest in the world. In February 2026 it had 13,569 electric locomotives, 4,169 diesels and 16 steam engines.
6.905 Billion Passengers and 1,588 Million Tonnes in 2023–24
On an average day in 2023–24, Indian Railways ran 13,198 passenger trains and 11,724 freight trains. The passenger total for the year, 6.905 billion journeys, is roughly five times India’s population. Much of it is commuting. The Mumbai Suburban Railway alone, spread over about 450 km of line, runs 2,342 services a day for more than 7.5 million commuters. That is around 40% of the railway’s daily commuters, and 2.64 billion riders a year. Indian Railways also runs suburban systems in Chennai (including the elevated MRTS opened in 1995), Kolkata, Pune and Secunderabad, and it operates the Kolkata Metro, India’s first metro, which opened on 24 October 1984.
Freight earns the money that keeps fares low. India has some of the lowest train fares in the world, and lower-class tickets are subsidised from goods traffic. The trouble is that passenger trains share the same lines and get priority, which pushed freight onto the roads until the early 2000s. The answer was the Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India, set up on 30 October 2006 to build goods-only lines: the Eastern corridor from Ludhiana in Punjab to Dankuni in West Bengal, and the Western corridor from Jawaharlal Nehru Port near Mumbai to Dadri in Uttar Pradesh, 3,260 km planned between them. Traffic on the corridors rose from an average of 241 trains a day in 2023–24 to 403 a day in 2024–25, and some goods trains have averaged 99.38 km/h, faster than a Rajdhani Express. The corridors build on a longer history of goods-only services: India’s first containerised freight trains ran between Bombay and Ahmedabad in 1966.
1853 to 1951: From Bori Bunder to 42 Merged Companies
The first train in India ran in 1837, on a granite line between Red Hills and Chintadripet in Madras. The date Indian Railways counts as its birthday is 16 April 1853, when a 14-carriage train carrying about 400 people, hauled by three locomotives named Sahib, Sindh and Sultan, covered the 34 km from Bori Bunder in Bombay to Thane in 57 minutes. Eastern India followed on 15 August 1854 with a 39 km line from Howrah to Hooghly, and the south on 1 July 1856 with the Royapuram–Arcot line out of Madras. In 1877 the Ajmer workshops built the first locomotive made in India.
The colonial network was built by private companies under government guarantees, which is why it grew in so many gauges. By 1950 about 42 separate railway companies were running around 55,000 km of line. They were merged into one national system, and in 1951–52 it was reorganised into six regional zones. The Southern zone came first, on 14 April 1951, followed by Central and Western on 5 November 1951. Factories came next: Chittaranjan Locomotive Works opened in 1950 and the Integral Coach Factory in Madras in 1955–56. The Fairy Queen, built in Leeds in 1855 for the East Indian Railway, was listed by Guinness in 1998 as the world’s oldest steam locomotive in regular service.
99.6% Electrified: From 1,500 V DC in 1925 to 25 kV AC
India’s first electric train ran on 3 February 1925, from Victoria Terminus (now Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus) in Bombay to Kurla, on 1,500 V DC. Madras electrified its Beach–Tambaram suburban line in 1931. In 1957 the railway chose 25 kV AC as its standard, and the first AC electric locomotives entered service in December 1959. As late as 2021, 37% of trains were still diesel-hauled.
The change since then has been fast. In 2017 the railway set a target of electrifying the whole broad-gauge network. By 31 July 2026, 70,143 km of a 70,412 km broad-gauge route had been wired, or 99.6%. Speeds have risen too. The Rajdhani Express of March 1969 was built for 120 km/h, the Shatabdi Express of 1988 for 150 km/h, and the Vande Bharat trainsets introduced in 2019 can reach 180 km/h, though they run at 130–160 km/h. True high-speed rail is still under construction: the Mumbai–Ahmedabad line, built with Japanese Shinkansen technology and a design speed of 350 km/h, began construction in February 2021, with a first section between Surat and Bilimora planned to open on 15 August 2027.
359 Metres Above the Chenab: Records in the Himalaya and Western Ghats
India’s terrain explains its biggest engineering records. The Jammu–Baramulla line gives the Kashmir Valley a link that keeps running when winter weather closes the Srinagar–Jammu highway, and to get there it has to cross the Pir Panjal range and the Chenab gorge. The foundation stone of the Jammu–Udhampur section was laid in 1983; the extension to Baramulla was announced in 1994. The Banihal–Qazigund tunnel under the Pir Panjal is 11.215 km long at an average elevation of 1,760 m and opened on 26 June 2013. Further south, between Kauri and Bakkal in Reasi district, the Chenab Rail Bridge carries the line 359 m above the riverbed. It is the highest rail bridge in the world: a 785 m steel arch with a 530 m approach, 1,315 m in total, built in seismic zone V and opened to traffic on 6 June 2025. It is covered in more detail in our guide to the Chenab Bridge.
The Konkan Railway on the west coast had the opposite problem: rivers and ridges coming down from the Western Ghats to the Arabian Sea. The British never built a line along this coast. The 756.25 km route from Roha in Maharashtra through Goa to Thokur in Karnataka needed more than 2,116 bridges and 92 tunnels, and the first train over the completed line ran on 26 January 1998. In 1999 it began India’s roll-on, roll-off service, carrying loaded lorries on flat wagons.
At the far south-east corner of the network, the sea itself had to be crossed. The original Pamban Bridge of 1914 carried trains from Mandapam on the mainland to Rameswaram on Pamban Island, until corrosion closed it in December 2022. Its replacement, the 2.07 km New Pamban Bridge, India’s first vertical-lift sea bridge, opened in April 2025.
4,155 km and 1,507 m: The Longest Run and the Longest Platform
The longest journey on the network shows how far the map stretches. Train 22503/22504, the Dibrugarh–Kanniyakumari Vivek Express, was introduced in 2013 for the 150th birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda. It runs 4,155 km in 74 hours 20 minutes with 57 stops. It starts in upper Assam, passes through Nagaland, West Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and ends at India’s southern tip. Its sister train from Okha, at the western tip of Gujarat, to Thoothukudi runs 3,043 km in 54 hours 25 minutes. Those distances put a sense of how big India is into a single ticket.
India also holds the world’s two longest platforms. Platform 1 at Hubballi Junction in Karnataka is 1,507 m long, the world’s longest as of March 2023. The second is at Gorakhpur Junction in Uttar Pradesh, headquarters of the North Eastern Railway: since its yard was remodelled on 6 October 2013, it has measured 1,366.33 m including the ramp.
2,260 Metres at Ghum: The Mountain Railways of 1881, 1903 and 1908
Three hill lines are kept as working heritage and together form the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Mountain Railways of India. The first to be listed, on 5 December 1999, was the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, an 88 km, 610 mm gauge line built between 1879 and 1881. It climbs from about 100 m at New Jalpaiguri to about 2,200 m at Darjeeling using six zig-zags and three loops. Its summit is Ghum station, at 2,260 m the highest railway station in India. Tourist literature sometimes calls Ghum the highest station in the world, but it is not: Tanggula on the Qinghai–Tibet line stands at 5,068 m.
The other two lines were added to the site later. The Kalka–Shimla Railway, a 762 mm line through the Siwalik Hills of Himachal Pradesh, opened in 1903. The Nilgiri Mountain Railway in Tamil Nadu, a metre-gauge line opened in 1908, is the only working rack railway in India, using a toothed rail to climb into the Nilgiri Hills. Beyond these, Indian Railways crosses into neighbouring countries in a few places: there is a link to Pakistan through Attari–Wagah, two links to Nepal as of 2021 with a third being built, and connections from West Bengal into Bangladesh. For the landforms these lines cross, from the Siwaliks to the Ghats, see our overview of India’s geography, and for how the Vande Bharat and the Mumbai–Ahmedabad line compare with other countries’ fast trains, read our high-speed rail comparison.