In the summer of 1858, the Great Indian Peninsula Railway was approaching one of the great milestones of its early history.
The railway had fought its way across the Western Ghats and was now descending towards Poona. Ahead lay the Mula River. Beyond it lay the city. Between the railway and its destination stood a massive masonry viaduct of twenty-two arches.
It was the Dapoorie Viaduct.
Today, the place is known as Dapodi and the bridge forms part of the railway line through Pune. But when it was built, Dapodi was still Dapoorie, Poona was a very different city, and India’s railway network was barely five years old. The stones of the viaduct therefore belong to one of the earliest chapters of Indian railway history. And, as we shall see, they also help correct a historical mistake that has survived for decades.
The railway’s advance towards Poona
The opening of the Bombay–Thane railway in 1853 had demonstrated that railways could work in India. But the real ambition of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway was much greater. It wanted to carry the railway from Bombay across the Western Ghats and into the Deccan. The Bhor Ghat was the great obstacle.
The climb from the coastal plain towards the summit presented the engineers with steep gradients, deep valleys and difficult terrain. At the same time, work was proceeding from the summit eastwards towards Poona.
The latter section might not have possessed the spectacular gradients of the Bhor Ghat incline, but it presented another problem: water.
The railway had to cross the rivers and valleys lying between the Ghats and Poona. One of the most important of these crossings was the Mula River at Dapoorie.
The Government report of 1856–57
A contemporary report of the Bombay Government gives us a rare glimpse of the railway while it was still under construction.
It describes Section No. 8 as the railway from the top of the Ghat to Poona, approximately 39½ miles in length.
The earthworks were substantially advanced, but the report draws particular attention to two structures:
“the two large viaducts, the most important works on this Section”
They were then approaching completion, with March 1858 given as the contractual completion date.
This single observation is important. It tells us that the great viaducts on the Poona approach belonged to the final stages of construction in 1857–58. Among them was the structure that would become known as the Dapoorie Viaduct.
Twenty-two arches across the Mula
The Dapoorie Viaduct was built as a long masonry structure, its twenty-two arches carrying the railway across the Mula and its floodplain. Each arch was approximately 33 feet in span.
There is something particularly impressive about the bridge when one considers the period in which it was built.
Railway engineering in India was still in its infancy. Iron bridges would eventually become common, but the engineers of the 1850s still relied heavily upon masonry. Stone was quarried, dressed and transported. Foundations had to be established in difficult ground. Piers had to be strong enough to support the permanent way and withstand the forces of floods. Arches had to be constructed accurately enough to carry a railway that would soon be carrying locomotives and trains.
The result was not merely a crossing of the Mula. It was a piece of infrastructure designed with the expectation that it would outlive its builders and It did.
Faviell and the construction of the Poona line
Behind the great engineering works of the GIPR were engineers, contractors and thousands of workers.
At the head of the railway’s engineering organisation stood James John Berkley, the company’s Chief Resident Engineer.
Among the principal contractors associated with the railway’s advance towards Poona was William Frederick Faviell.
Contemporary accounts describe the Bombay–Poona undertaking as being placed in Faviell’s hands. Accounts of his work describe the continuation from the summit of the Bhor Ghat towards Poona as involving a large amount of masonry and several large viaducts.
Faviell’s organisation employed engineers including Home, Dickinson and Scott. This puts Faviell firmly into the story of the railway’s construction towards Poona. But there is a distinction worth making. It is tempting to write simply:
“William Faviell built the Dapoorie Viaduct.”
The surviving evidence does not quite allow me to go that far.
We have strong evidence connecting Faviell with the construction undertaking that carried the GIPR from the Bhor Ghat towards Poona. We also know that the Poona section contained major masonry works and viaducts.
What we have not yet found is the original contract document naming Dapoorie individually and stating that Faviell was responsible for its construction. Nor have we identified the individual engineer who designed the bridge.
So in my opinion the most defensible conclusion is that the Dapoorie Viaduct was constructed as part of the GIPR’s Poona works undertaken through Faviell’s contracting organisation.
Was Sangam the other great viaduct?
The contemporary Government report mentions two large viaducts on the section between the summit of the Bhor Ghat and Poona.
We know one of them. The other presents an intriguing possibility. Near the western approach to historic Poona, the railway had to cross the Mutha River at Sangam.
The original railway bridge there is believed to date from around 1857. It was built for railway traffic and was later superseded by another railway bridge. The older structure eventually found a second life as a road bridge.
The geography fits remarkably well. A train approaching Poona from the west would encounter:
Bhor Ghat → Dapoorie Viaduct on Mula River → Old Sangam Bridge on the Mutha River → Poona
It is therefore tempting to identify the two great viaducts mentioned in the 1856–57 Government report as the Dapoorie and original Sangam railway bridges.
The chronology fits too. But there is a small problem. The Government report does not name the two structures. Until the original engineering or contract records are found, we should therefore treat the Dapoorie–Sangam identification as a strong historical hypothesis, rather than a proven fact. However I have personally travelled in that section and as per my own experience the Sangam Bridge is actually the second bridge for sure.
The railway reaches Poona
By the spring of 1858, the work was approaching its moment of truth. A trial train travelled from Khandala towards Poona on 15 May 1858. Then, on 14 June 1858, the Bombay Government recorded the opening of the Khandala–Poona section to public traffic.
The railway had reached Poona.
The contemporary report identifies this as Contract No. 8, linking the event directly to the construction programme described in the previous year’s report.
For the engineers, contractors and workers who had spent years fighting the terrain, this was a remarkable achievement. For Poona, it marked the beginning of a new era. And standing on the railway line approaching the city was the great stone viaduct at Dapoorie.
A photograph from the year it was born
Dapoorie has another remarkable advantage over many early railway structures. We can actually see what it looked like when it was new. The British Library preserves a photograph catalogued as “Dapoorie Viaduct [Bombay]”, dating from approximately 1858. The photograph shows the long masonry viaduct standing in the landscape near Poona, its succession of arches clearly visible.
It is difficult to imagine a better historical record of the bridge’s early life. The photograph was taken at almost exactly the moment when the railway was reaching Poona. The bridge was new. The railway was new. And the city beyond it was about to be transformed by the arrival of the railway.
More than a century and a half later, that photograph allows us to look at the Dapoorie Viaduct almost as its builders would have seen it.
The mystery of 1854
There is, however, a problem with the history of Dapoorie.
For years, 1854 has appeared in accounts as the date of its construction. At first glance, it seems like a plausible date. The first GIPR railway opened in 1853, and the railway was rapidly expanding. But 1854 does not survive scrutiny. The contemporary Government report of 1856–57 says that the major viaducts on the Poona section were still approaching completion. The following year’s report records the opening of the Khandala–Poona section on 14 June 1858. The surviving photograph of Dapoorie is dated 1858. Specialist railway research also dates the completion of the Dapoorie Viaduct to 1858.
The chronology is therefore remarkably consistent.
So where did 1854 come from?
The answer appears to lie in a confusion between two different GIPR viaducts.
The Tannah Viaduct, associated with the original Bombay–Thane railway, does indeed belong to the 1854 period. It connected Bombay Island with the mainland and was one of the early engineering achievements of the GIPR.
At some point, descriptions associated with that structure appear to have become attached to the Dapoorie photograph and later histories. The result was a bridge that acquired the wrong date and, in some accounts, the wrong historical setting.
The distinction is crucial:
Tannah — Bombay–Thane — 1854
Dapoorie — Mula River, Poona — 1858
The two structures belong to different stages of the GIPR’s expansion.
A bridge that witnessed a changing railway
The Dapoorie Viaduct has now stood for more than a century and a half. In that time, almost everything around it has changed.
The railway company that built it disappeared. The locomotives changed from small nineteenth-century steam engines to increasingly powerful steam locomotives, then to diesel and electric traction. Poona became Pune. Dapoorie became Dapodi. The countryside through which the first trains passed became part of a rapidly expanding urban landscape. But the viaduct remained. Its arches have witnessed the transformation of the railway from a pioneering experiment into one of the world’s great railway systems.
The significance of Dapoorie
The Dapoorie Viaduct is sometimes described simply as an “old railway bridge”. That description misses its real significance.
It belongs to the first generation of railway engineering in India. It was constructed at a time when engineers were still developing the techniques that would eventually allow railways to cross mountains, rivers and vast distances across the subcontinent. It formed part of the GIPR’s advance from the summit of the Western Ghats towards Poona. It stood among the major engineering works that made the opening of the Khandala–Poona railway possible in 1858. And, unusually for such an early structure, we have a photograph showing it almost at the moment of its completion.
The Dapoorie Viaduct therefore connects three moments in railway history: the ambition to cross the Western Ghats,, the arrival of the railway in Poona, and the beginning of the vast railway network that would eventually transform India. Its stones have survived all three.
Dapoorie today
More than 165 years after the first train crossed the Mula at Dapoorie, trains still pass over the historic alignment.
Passengers rushing through Pune may barely notice the old masonry beneath the rails. But beneath them is a bridge built when railway technology in India was still in its infancy. The men who designed and constructed it could not have known how long their work would survive. They were building a railway for their own age. They inadvertently built a monument for ours.
The Dapoorie Viaduct is therefore not merely a surviving bridge. It is a surviving fragment of the moment when the railway first reached the Deccan.
And on 14 June 1858, when the railway finally opened the Khandala–Poona section, those twenty-two arches over the Mula became part of that extraordinary story. They have been carrying the railway ever since.
Sources & References
- Bombay Presidency, Report on the Administration of Public Affairs in the Bombay Presidency for the Year 1856–57 — particularly the Railway Branch and the description of Section No. 8, from the summit of the Ghat to Poona, including the two major viaducts approaching completion.
Granth Sanjeevani — 1856–57 Government Report - Bombay Presidency, Annual Report on the Administration of the Bombay Presidency for the Year 1858–59 — the contemporary report recording the opening of the Khandala–Poona section on 14 June 1858.
Granth Sanjeevani — 1858–59 Government Report - British Library, Photo 254/3(41), “Dapoorie Viaduct [Bombay]” — the historic photograph of the viaduct, dating from circa 1858. This is the source I would link directly from the photograph caption as well.
British Library — Dapoorie Viaduct photograph catalogue record - FIBIwiki, “Dapoorie Viaduct” — useful specialist compilation of the bridge’s history, dimensions, early photographs and, importantly, the correction of the erroneous 1854 attribution.
FIBIwiki — Dapoorie Viaduct - Wikimedia Commons — “Dapoorie Viaduct, Poona, 1858” — a convenient high-resolution reproduction of the British Library photograph. The page also identifies the catalogue reference as IOSM 254/3(41) and records the image as approximately 1858.
Wikimedia Commons — Dapoorie Viaduct, Poona, 1858 - James John Berkley, “On Indian Railways: With a Description of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway,” Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Vol. XIX (1859–60) — contemporary engineering evidence from the GIPR’s Chief Resident Engineer.
Bibliographic reference and archival discussion of Berkley’s paper - Ian J. Kerr — archival research citing Maharashtra State Archives, PWD (Railways) — particularly useful for the Faviell contracts and the original Maharashtra State Archives references.
Ian J. Kerr — archival references to GIPR and Maharashtra State Archives records
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