Bombay, Baroda & Central India Railway, Including Rajputana-Malwa Railway...

Rare and unrecorded quarterly information and fare guide for the Bombay, Baroda and Central India Railway (B.B.C.I.) and newly merged Rajputan-Malwa Railway from Bombay to Ferozepore, Delhi, Agra, Kanpur, Jodhpur, and Khandwa via Ajmer.

Printed by the Rajputana-Malwa Railway Press, located in the famous Ajmer Workshops which would produce the first Indian steam locomotive just five years later in 1895, an obscure and little known press of which this copy is one of the few surviving publications testifying to its existence. The type faces and formats are enjoyably uneven and speak to the limited font that the press would have been able to utilise. Ajmer did have a mission press around the same time but there seems to be no mention of any change of name or proprietor, and the mission press has no history of railway publications.

The contents, along with copious tables of the various lines and rates, contain the extensive rules and regulations of the railways at the time which reveal a wealth of cultural information. Such tidbits include: concession fares for travelling cricket teams, parcel charges for Bazaar supplies, prices of ice boxes, bicycle luggage rates, 11 pages of regulations for transporting pets and livestock, restrictions on imports of opium, and more besides.

Ajmer, and its workshops, stayed as the crux of the lines of the B.B.C.I. due to its situation at junction of changes in gauge. In 1889 the management of the metre gauge Rajputana–Malwa Railway (earlier known as Rajputana State Railway) was taken over by the B.B.C.I., which previously operated only broad gauge lines. The map, lithographed in London by W. & A. K. Johnston, shows both lines and indicates the changes in gauge accordingly, still with the tipped on slip naming the lines not yet open for traffic. This remains as evidence of the relatively short success of the independent railway business in India as the B.B.C.I. would be purchased by the government in 1905 and was fully nationalised in 1942.

First edition; large 8vo (27 x 18 cm); large folding colour lithograph map to front, folding milage table to rear, small tear to map hinge; publisher's original printed wrappers, frayed and with tears to spine but without any noticeable loss, a very good copy; xxx, 268 pp.