For a vast number of migrant workers, travel has always involved hardship and a struggle for space. However, the recent proliferation of images of trains packed way beyond capacity, passengers clinging to any available space, and desperate crowds pushing, shoving, even becoming violent in their struggle to board suggests that the malaise has worsened.

Stories are emerging of nightmarish journeys, where children wail through the night in the sheer crush of bodies and exhausted travellers are forced to stand for hours. For some, the chaos of these trains evokes haunting parallels to another time, to the frantic, desperate journeys across newly drawn borders during Partition, when survival was uncertain and every train carried its own share of tragedy.

In her book Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay lamented the reshaping of American cities around cars rather than people. She argued that this excessive reliance on automobiles comes with significant economic, environmental and social costs. The US transportation system, now overwhelmingly car-centric, saw the dismantling of railways as a mass rapid transit option. This outcome was driven in part by corporate interests in the automobile, oil and road construction industries that influenced urban planning.

The role of the automobile industry in India has been similarly transformative. With the introduction of Maruti Suzuki in the 1980s cars became emblematic of middle-class aspirations. The rapid expansion of car ownership, in part, led to suburban development. The shift also began locking people into car dependency, eroding traditional forms of community life and exacerbating traffic congestion, pollution and a lack of pedestrian-friendly spaces.

This shift has fundamentally altered how Indians imagine the country, as highway development prioritises automobile dependency over public transportation. But unlike highways that isolate travellers in private vehicles, trains potentially provide space for social interactions and collective experiences.

Physical spaces foster a sense of belonging through direct engagement and people have always identified intensely with cities or landscapes that affect them emotionally. However, the dominance of a car-centric model has led to urban sprawl, leaving many inhabitants unfamiliar with large sections of mega-cities they inhabit.

Meanwhile, expressway infrastructure, which is replacing the railways for inter-city and long-distance travel for many, require no engagement with the cities and rural landscapes they traverse, leading to a sense of visual fatigue and emotional estrangement.

Railways and the making of nations

Railway systems have historically functioned as instruments of colonial control, labour exploitation and state repression on the one hand, even as they have aided connectivity for economic transformation, political integration and territorial consolidation.

In the 19th century, for instance, the Prussian-led construction of rail networks was instrumental in the unification of Germany in 1871. The expansion of the railway system under Otto von Bismarck facilitated not only trade and military mobilisation but also national integration by physically connecting disparate regions under a central authority.

In the US, the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 symbolised the binding of the East and West coasts. It played a crucial role in the economic and political consolidation of the US, enabling migration, commerce and the assertion of federal authority over distant territories.

The Trans-Siberian Railway, a monumental project that took almost quarter of a century to be built, reinforced Russian control over vast, sparsely populated territories after it was completed in 1915.

The railways have often been woven into the fabric of national identity. The TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse), launched in the 1980s, became a symbol of French technological prowess and efficiency. Similarly, recent projects like the China-Europe Railway Express, which links Chinese industries with European markets under the Belt and Road Initiative, reflects China’s ambitions as a global economic powerhouse.

The Raj and the railway

At the heart of what was to become British empire, the railways in the early 19th century, such as the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, accelerated Britain’s Industrial Revolution by connecting coalfields, factories and ports.

The British introduced railways in India in 1853, primarily to transport goods and raw materials (especially cotton and grain) to ports for export to Britain. While the railway network expanded dramatically reaching over 64,000 km by the early 20th century, it was designed to serve colonial economic interests rather than local development.

The railways came to be central to colonial rule, facilitating resource extraction, administrative control, and military mobilisation in British India. Nevertheless, the railways inadvertently contributed to anti-colonial movements by fostering nationalist consciousness.

Gandhi, despite his critique of railways as instruments of colonial exploitation – he argued in Hind Swaraj in 1909 that they facilitated the spread of materialism, disease, and British control –strategically used trains to reach ordinary Indians. His train journeys across India allowed him to connect with diverse communities, transforming rail compartments into spaces of political dialogue.

The railways facilitated the movement of activists and intellectuals, allowing them to spread nationalist ideas and organise resistance across regions. The Indian National Congress and other political groups relied on rail travel to convene meetings, coordinate protests, and disseminate periodicals and pamphlets, making the railway system a vital infrastructure for political mobilisation.

In the period between the World Wars and immediately thereafter, the railways became instruments of war and national horror too. Just as the railways facilitated the deportation of millions to Nazi concentration and extermination camps in Europe, they became the conduit for the “transfer of populations” and the horrific violence following Partition.

Post-colonial assertion

After decolonisation, newly independent nations reclaimed railway networks to assert sovereignty, drive economic modernisation, and promote national integration. Indian Railways became a nationalised entity post-Independence, repurposed as a developmental tool rather than an extraction mechanism for colonial trade.

Similarly, built with Chinese assistance in 1970s, the Tanzania-Zambia Railway symbolised Pan-African cooperation and was designed to reduce dependence on colonial-era rail lines that linked African economies to European trade routes. Many African nations are currently working on revitalising their rail infrastructure with international investments, particularly from China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

While many Latin American countries nationalised their railways, neoliberal policies in the late 20th century led to privatisation and underfunding, causing railway networks to decline in the similar fashion as we are witnessing in India now.

Working-class movements

Beyond their economic and geopolitical role, the railways have facilitated rural-to-urban migration, and enabled labour strikes and resistance.

Colonial rail infrastructure and operations created large and distinct industrial workforces including engineers, conductors, track layers, station workers, and maintenance crews. Yet in almost all countries, work in the railways was dangerous and underpaid, leading to frequent worker unrest and strikes. This made the railways a testing ground for early trade unionism. Railway workers often formed some of the first organised labour unions, demanding better wages, working conditions and job security. This inspired resistance in the workforce in other sectors and sometimes lead to restructuring of labour relations.

Railway strikes to demand better conditions were frequent in British India between the 1920s and 1940s, and these strikes often became acts of political resistance against British rule.

One of the most significant railways strikes in post-Independence India was the 1974 All India Railway Strike, led by the All India Railwaymen’s Federation. (Its president George Fernandes later went on to become railway minister in VP Singh government in the 1989-’90.) Over 1.7 million railway workers went on strike for nearly 20 days. Though ultimately crushed by the Indira Gandhi government, the strike remains a landmark event in India’s labour movement.

Indian Railways has navigated a shifting balance between financial viability and public service. Lalu Prasad Yadav’s tenure in the 2000s marked a rare phase where operational surpluses were achieved without raising fares, using pricing innovations and better asset utilisation. Mamata Banerjee, while also keeping fares unchanged, expanded concessions – but strained the organisation’s finances.

Recently though, the National Democratic Alliance governments led by Narendra Modi have focused on prestige projects such as Vande Bharat express trains and premium services in the privatised Tejas Express. They have gradually divested from the services centred on the masses of poor and working-class passengers. The number of unreserved coaches and general-class trains has been reduced, making travel more expensive and difficult for poorer sections.

The shift towards road and air transport has also resulted in the stagnation or decline of railway passenger growth among India’s affluent sections. Despite claims of expansion, Indian Railways has decommissioned several branch lines, especially in rural and less profitable regions. The outsourcing of the so-called non-core railway functions such as catering, ticketing and even train operations has led to the decline of traditional railway employment structures.

Overall Indian Railway network, services, and workforce have been shrinking in significant ways.

Getting back on track

In many countries the decline of railways as a mass rapid transport system for people was not merely an organic shift toward cars and has often preceded by a combination of accidents, inefficiencies, underinvestment, and deliberate policy shifts that eroded public confidence in rail travel. This created the justification for highway expansion and privatised road transport while reinforcing the narrative that railways were outdated, unreliable and unsafe.

In India, people who cannot afford it are forced to scrounge and buy a car. There is an ecological cost to this shift – one that is felt in the air we breathe and the cities we build. But what has been ignored so far is the cultural impact – the social stress and rage caused by the frustrating experiences of people immobilised because of lack of affordable and viable transit would be difficult to contain.

A train ticket is a pass to shared spaces – stations where travellers pause together in transit and compartments where strangers meet. The weakening of this system in favour of highways is forcing the working class into expensive automobile transport and reinforcing social isolation and economic exclusion.

A nation that neglects its trains in favour of highways is not merely choosing one mode of transport over another. It is deciding about who gets to move, who gets left behind and what kind of country it wants to be.

Ghazala Jamil is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University.