The story of India's railways, past and present, is fascinating but, despite a voluminous body of railway related writings that began over a century and a half ago, it remains a story little told in many of its dimensions. What has been told is surveyed in a bibliographical essay that forms part of the introduction to the volume. However the central focus of the book is to explore aspects of the little or inadequately known dimensions of India's railways in order to stimulate the emergence of a more multidemnsional, multidisciplinary, contextualised understanding of the railways in India and the ways in which they shaped the emergence of modern India and continue to do so.
The book covers a range of topics from Railways in partition literature and films, Railway Workshops and labour to Private and State Enterprise in finacing and managing railways of Colonial North India