{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Incredible India Travel | Social Impact & Culture Tours","title":"Mumbai to Pune Heritage Tour: The Extraordinary Victorian Railway That 42,000 Workers Built Through the Western Ghats and Changed India Forever","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1320,"description":"In 1854 a British engineer looked up at the Western Ghats and proposed building a railway through them.His superiors said no.He proposed it again. No. Again. No.For decades the answer was always some version of the same thing. The gradients were too steep. The terrain was too difficult. The engineering was impossible. The Western Ghats rose over 1800 feet in sixteen miles between the Konkan coastal plain and the Deccan Plateau, and no conventional railway locomotive could climb a gradient that severe without simply sliding back down the hill.But there was cotton on the other side of those hills. Vast quantities of extraordinary quality cotton growing on the Deccan Plateau, the cotton that the mills of Lancashire needed and that the port of Bombay could export to the world if only someone could find a way to get it down the mountain.Between 1856 and 1863 someone did.Forty-two thousand workers at the peak of construction. Twenty-five tunnels blasted through solid basalt by hand. Eight stone viaducts rising up to 160 feet above the valley floor. Fifty-four million cubic feet of rock excavated over seven years. And a reversing station at Khandala, a piece of Victorian railway engineering so unusual it has no equivalent anywhere else in India, that allowed trains to climb a gradient that every expert had declared impossible by switching direction in a zigzag pattern that traded distance for steepness.The Times of London called it one of the greatest triumphs of 19th-century civil engineering in the world.The tunnels are still there. The viaducts are still there. The trains still use them today. And the story of who built them, including a Victorian woman from Leek in Staffordshire who took over the construction contract after her husband died within a month of arriving in India and managed the most complex engineering project in Asia from England for seven years, is one of the most extraordinary and most completely untold stories in the history of Indian railway...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/eWrZ3doNBWF40S0S56sC17IDwfhLRtHiDkqKOrNCvtA/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS85Yjg5/Y2Q3ODM2NzZkOTcz/NGJiMWMwMDEzMTFl/YjI3NC5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}