Barsi Light Railway
narrow-gauge railway
Barsi Light Railway (BLR) was a 202-mile (325 km) long, 2 ft 6 in (762 mm) narrow-gauge railway between Miraj and Latur in the state of Maharashtra in India. It was designed by British engineer Everard Calthrop, and regarded as having revolutionised narrow-gauge railway construction in India.
Classification
It was labeled as a Class II railway according to Indian Railway Classification System of 1926.
Background: The Barsi Tramway Project
The Barsee Tramway was a project, proposed in 1862, to construct a bullock driven Tramway 'to connect Barsee with the Barsee railway station’. In the event the Tramway was not installed but the groundwork had been completed with the construction of the earth works, cuttings and bridges and was completed in 1870 [3].
By the 1870’s Barsi had become the spelling of the town. Barsi Town was connected to Barsi Road Station on the GIPR, a distance of 22 mi (35 km), utilising the completed groundworks providing a 24 ft (7.3 m) wide roadway with 'hard shoulders' [4] and designed to be built with sufficient strength to carry locomotives and the gradients which did not exceed 1 in 100 [3]. The Seena (Sina) River bridge was a ten arch masonry constructed bridge.
History
Calthrop worked as a locomotive inspector for the Great Indian Peninsula Railway (GIPR), and in 1886 requested leave to investigate proposals for independent branch lines. He identified two schemes of particular interest – a 5-mile (8 km) tramway connecting the Hindu religious centre of Nasik with the railway, and a 21-mile (34 km) branch line to the town of Barshi.
“Barsi Light Railway” enters the record as narrow-gauge railway. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Barsi, Light and Railway can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Barsi Light Railway” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.