Category: Forgotten Railways

On 1/04/24 the existing Daund-Manmad Section of the Solapur Division was transferred to Pune Division. The transfer of this section from Solapur Division of Central Railway to Pune Division was intended to solve the operational issues of the section. Having closely associated with this transfer exercise out of curiosity I decided to research upon this section and its historical relevance.

Built as a strategic railway connection across the Deccan, the Daund–Manmad line was intended primarily to serve the wider railway network. Yet, after opening in 1878, it transformed the movement of goods and people, altered older transport systems and helped create a new generation of railway towns.

A railway built as a chord

When the Great Indian Peninsula Railway (GIPR) expanded across western India during the nineteenth century, its network developed along two important axes. One ran north-eastwards from Bombay through the Deccan towards Manmad; another extended south-eastwards through Pune and Daund towards Solapur and the southern parts of the subcontinent.

The geographical problem was obvious. These two arms of the railway network were connected only indirectly. The solution was a railway across the Deccan from Daund to Manmad.

Surveyed as early as 1868, the proposed line was eventually taken up during the railway expansion associated with the famine years of the 1870s. The 145½-mile route became known as the Daund–Manmad State Railway, or Dhond–Manmad Railway in contemporary records. It was a chord—a direct connection between two points of a larger railway network.

Its principal purpose was therefore not the development of the towns through which it passed. It was intended to facilitate through traffic between the northern and southern sections of the GIPR, avoiding the need for traffic to make a longer journey through Bombay.

Yet, like so many railway projects in colonial India, the consequences of the line extended far beyond the intentions of its builders.

Daund before the chord

The railway did not create Daund from nothing.

Daund had already acquired a railway connection in the late 1850s, when the railway towards Solapur was being developed. Its location subsequently became much more important because of its position at the intersection of railway routes.

The opening of the Daund–Manmad line in 1878 changed the function of the settlement. Daund was no longer simply a station on the route towards Solapur. It had become a junction, linking two important directions of railway movement across the Deccan.

This distinction is important. The history of Daund’s transformation is therefore not simply a story of a railway arriving at a rural settlement. It was a gradual process: railway station → junction → operating centre → railway town.

The later development of locomotive facilities, railway housing and other institutional infrastructure would give Daund an increasingly distinctive railway identity.

A railway born in the years of famine

The construction of the Daund–Manmad line coincided with one of the most severe famine crises of nineteenth-century western India. The railway was consequently part of two very different colonial responses to the crisis.

On one hand, railway construction provided employment to people affected by famine. On the other, the completed railway formed part of the wider imperial transport infrastructure through which food, commodities, troops and other traffic could be moved.

It would be misleading, however, to describe the railway simply as a famine-relief project. Contemporary evidence indicates that its larger strategic purpose was the creation of a through route between the northern and southern branches of the GIPR.

The famine therefore accelerated the construction of a railway whose underlying purpose was considerably broader.

This dual character is worth remembering when looking at the line today: it was simultaneously a piece of famine-era infrastructure and an element of the British imperial railway network.

Opening the route

The Daund–Manmad railway was opened in stages and was in operation by 1878.

The completed route passed through a succession of places whose economic functions were very different from one another. Daund was a junction; Ahmednagar was an established administrative and commercial centre; other stations served agricultural hinterlands and local markets; while Manmad was developing into one of the major railway centres of the region.

The railway therefore did not produce a uniform transformation. Instead, it connected places that subsequently used the railway in very different ways.

From State railway to GIPR operation

The early financial history of the line provides a useful indication of its development. The Daund–Manmad railway was initially worked as a State railway. From 1 January 1881, its working was transferred to the Great Indian Peninsula Railway.

The financial statistics show a gradual improvement rather than an immediate commercial success.

Year	Gross earnings	Net earnings	Return on capital
1879	₹4.68 lakh	−₹0.98 lakh	—
1881	₹6.34 lakh	₹1.23 lakh	1.23%
1885	₹9.07 lakh	₹2.21 lakh	2.15%
1890	₹10.61 lakh	₹2.63 lakh	2.39%
1892	₹12.18 lakh	₹3.28 lakh	2.96%

Between 1879 and 1892, gross earnings increased from approximately ₹4.7 lakh to more than ₹12.1 lakh. The line moved from a net loss in its first recorded year to a net earning of more than ₹3.2 lakh by 1892.

The returns were modest, but the trend demonstrates that traffic on the route was steadily developing. More importantly, the railway’s significance cannot be measured only through its direct financial return. Its purpose was partly network efficiency: connecting two arms of the larger GIPR system and enabling traffic to bypass Bombay.

The value of the railway therefore lay partly in the traffic it carried and partly in the new possibilities created by its position within the wider network.

What did the railway actually carry?

The early railway was far more than a passenger service.

Official railway records show traffic consisting of food grains, minerals, livestock, railway materials, construction materials, military stores and other commodities. This is significant because it reveals the railway as part of a much larger economic and administrative system.

Agricultural produce could move towards railway stations and then into distant markets. Construction materials could be brought into the developing railway system. Military and government traffic could be moved rapidly across the Deccan.

The railway was therefore creating a new transport hierarchy.

The traditional road network did not disappear. Instead, carts, pack animals and local carriers increasingly became part of a feeder system bringing people and goods to the railway. The railway and the older transport system thus existed alongside each other—but their relative importance was changing.

Daund: when traffic was redistributed rather than simply increased

One of the most revealing consequences of the new line can be seen at Daund itself.

Before the opening of the Daund–Manmad railway, goods moving from parts of the Deccan towards the railway network were often concentrated at Daund.

The new line changed this pattern. Stations along the new route allowed goods to enter the railway network closer to their places of origin. Contemporary district records observed that the opening of the Daund–Manmad line reduced Daund’s earlier importance as a goods station because traffic from areas served by the new stations no longer had to converge on Daund.

This is an important correction to the usual story of railway development. The railway did not simply make every existing railway centre busier. It redistributed traffic. Daund gained enormously in importance as a junction, even while some forms of goods traffic that had previously concentrated there were diverted to stations farther along the new route.

Railway geography was being reorganised.

The grain markets of the new railway

The effect of the railway becomes particularly visible in the agricultural economy.

At Puntamba, for example, contemporary records noted that approximately 1,175 tons of grain were exported through the railway station in 1880.

Lasalgaon provides another striking example. It developed as an important grain market, attracting large numbers of carts and pack animals carrying agricultural produce from surrounding areas, including territories beyond the immediate railway district.

The railway therefore did not simply replace the old transport system.

A farmer or merchant still needed carts or pack animals to reach the station. But once the goods reached the railway, they could travel much farther, more quickly and at lower cost than was possible by traditional long-distance carriage.

The railway thus connected local agricultural markets to a much larger commercial geography.

But there were losers too

The economic transformation brought by the railway was not universally beneficial.

For centuries, goods had been moved across the Deccan by road using carts, pack animals and specialised carrying communities. The arrival of the railway undermined part of this older transport economy.

Evidence from the Ahmednagar region records a marked fall in cart-hire rates following the opening of the railway. Contemporary officials explicitly associated this decline with the new railway’s competition with road transport.

The impact extended to communities traditionally involved in long-distance carrying, including Banjara and Laman groups. Their traditional role as carriers became less important as railways took over long-distance freight movement. Some adapted by turning towards agriculture and other occupations.

The railway, therefore, did not simply create a new economy. It reorganised an existing one.

Some groups gained from cheaper and faster transport; others lost the occupations on which their livelihoods had depended.

Ahmednagar: an old town meets a new network

Ahmednagar’s experience was different from that of Daund. Unlike Daund, Ahmednagar was already an established historic, administrative and commercial centre when the railway arrived. The railway did not create the town. Instead, it attached an existing urban centre to a rapidly expanding regional and imperial transport network.

This distinction allows us to see the varied effects of the Daund–Manmad railway. At Ahmednagar, the railway became another layer added to an existing urban economy. At agricultural stations such as Puntamba and Lasalgaon, it strengthened the connection between local production and distant markets. At Daund, the railway increasingly became the economic identity of the town itself. At Manmad, the line contributed to the growth of a major railway interchange.

The same railway therefore produced different kinds of historical change along its route.

The making of a railway town

The most enduring transformation occurred at Daund.

A railway junction requires far more than platforms and tracks.

It needs station staff, signalmen, pointsmen, permanent-way workers, locomotive crews, maintenance workers, clerks, labourers and a host of ancillary occupations. Around these employees grew an economic ecosystem of contractors, vendors, shopkeepers, caterers and service providers.

Later, railway housing, medical facilities and other institutional infrastructure further strengthened this railway-centred community.

By the twentieth century, Daund had developed many of the characteristics of what has been described as a transport town—a settlement whose population depended significantly upon railway employment, daily labour, contracts, vending and catering.

The distinction is important. Daund was not merely a town through which trains happened to pass. Its economy increasingly grew around the railway.

From junction to locomotive centre

The railway’s role in Daund became still more pronounced with the development of locomotive facilities.

By the twentieth century, Daund had become an important steam locomotive operating centre. Historical records from the 1970s show a broad-gauge steam shed at Daund with both WP passenger locomotives and WG goods locomotives.

The steam era eventually came to an end. The Daund steam shed was closed in 1981 as Indian Railways moved away from steam traction. But the disappearance of steam did not mean the disappearance of Daund’s railway identity. The town continued to function as an important railway operating centre, and a new electric locomotive shed was commissioned at Daund in 2024.

The technology changed: steam → diesel → electric, but the fundamental role of Daund within the railway network endured.

A railway community

The physical railway infrastructure also produced a social landscape.

Railway colonies provided housing for employees and their families. Railway hospitals and dispensaries catered to the workforce. Schools, recreational facilities and other institutions gradually developed around railway settlements across India.

Daund was no exception. The railway colony became a substantial component of the town’s urban landscape, surviving long after the colonial railway administration itself had disappeared. This is one of the less visible legacies of nineteenth-century railway construction.

Railways did not merely connect existing towns. They created new communities organised around railway employment and railway institutions.

Manmad and the expanding railway network

At the other end of the chord, Manmad was already an important railway location when the Daund connection was opened. Its importance increased further as other railway systems reached the town in the following decades.

The result was a growing interchange between railway networks serving different regions of the Deccan and central India. The Daund–Manmad line must therefore be understood not as an isolated branch, but as one component of an expanding railway system.

Its importance came precisely from its position between other lines. The value of the chord was the network it completed.

A railway that outlived the Empire

The British administration built the Daund–Manmad railway for purposes that were largely strategic and commercial.

It was intended to facilitate the movement of traffic across the Deccan and to strengthen the internal connectivity of the imperial railway network. But the consequences went far beyond the intentions of its builders.

The railway:

• connected agricultural markets with distant centres;
• changed the economics of long-distance transport;
• weakened sections of the traditional carrying trade;
• redistributed goods traffic among previously smaller stations;
• strengthened existing towns such as Ahmednagar;
• helped transform Daund into a railway town;
• created employment and railway-dependent businesses;
• and established an infrastructure whose importance continued after Independence.

Its greatest legacy was therefore not simply the railway line itself. It was the new economic geography created around the line.

The chord became a corridor

The Daund–Manmad railway began as a relatively simple proposition: connect two arms of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway by the shortest practical route across the Deccan.

But railways rarely remain merely engineering projects. Once the tracks were laid, they altered the movement of commodities, changed the fortunes of transport communities, created new markets and redistributed economic activity among towns and villages.

At Daund, the transformation went further. A station became a junction; the junction became an operating centre; and the operating centre helped create a railway town whose identity remains closely tied to the railway more than 140 years later.

The history of the Daund–Manmad railway therefore illustrates a larger truth about colonial India’s railways. They were built to serve an imperial network, but they also created new regional economies and communities that survived the Empire itself.

The chord that was laid across the Deccan in 1878 ultimately became much more than a shortcut between two railway lines. It became a corridor of economic and social change.

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Further Reading

1. Bombay Presidency Gazetteers — especially the volumes dealing with Poona and Ahmednagar, for contemporary descriptions of the railway, markets and settlements.
2. Administration Reports of the Bombay Presidency — useful for railway construction, expenditure, traffic and working statistics.
3. Great Indian Peninsula Railway records and maps — particularly for understanding the development of the Daund–Manmad connection within the wider GIPR network.
4. Census of India — for studying the subsequent demographic growth of Daund and other railway settlements.
5. India Railway Board / Indian Railways historical records — for the development of locomotive sheds, railway colonies and railway institutions.
6. D. P. Hall-Matthews, Peasants, Famine and the State in Colonial Western India — for the relationship between famine, railway construction, agricultural markets and the older transport economy of western India.