I have done solo train journeys before, but nothing like this one. The earlier ones were short, four or five hours at most, the kind where you barely settle in before it is time to get down. This was a different class of journey altogether. Train 10103, the Mandovi Express, from Mumbai CSMT all the way down to Madgaon in Goa. Roughly fourteen hours on paper, more in reality, cutting through the Konkan coast in the middle of monsoon. This is the one I had been looking forward to, and it earned every bit of that anticipation.
The night before, and a two hour head start on chaos
I did not exactly arrive at this train rested.
The night before, I had done a six hour midnight cycling event through South Mumbai with a group of strangers, a 25 km circuit that started at 11pm. I had already checked out of my hostel in Andheri the previous evening, on the anticipation that the ride might run late and I would not make it back across the city in time to catch a 7:10am train anyway. The ride actually wrapped up earlier than expected, and I was back near CSMT by around 3am. With no hostel bed to go to, I took a sleeping pod at the Namah lounge inside CSMT, grabbed a shower and whatever half sleep I could manage in there.
And then the train had its own plans. Mandovi Express, which normally leaves CSMT at 7:10am, had been rescheduled to 9:30am. On the one hand this was a small mercy, it meant I could extend my time in the pod and actually get some proper rest instead of a rushed few hours. On the other hand, that two hour late start is the seed of the entire day. Everything that happened later, all the waiting at stations, all the halts to let other trains pass, traces straight back to the train leaving two hours behind schedule. It never got that time back. It only lost more.
So I checked out of the pod around 9am, had breakfast at the IRCTC restaurant near platform 14, and walked over to platform 15 where my train was waiting, boarding right on time at 9:30am. Already a little worn out, already two hours behind, and about to have the most peaceful fifteen hours I could have asked for.
Boarding at CSMT
I want to be honest about how I felt getting on, because it is a feeling I want to remember. Nervously excited. Both things at once.
The excited part is obvious. But the nervous part is worth explaining. On a journey like this you get locked into a small cabin with three other strangers for the better part of a day, and the entire experience can hinge on who those three people turn out to be. Most of the time you get lucky and end up with decent company, maybe even good company. But there is always that small chance that you draw the kind of co passengers you spend the rest of the ride wishing you never had. You have no control over it. You just board and find out.
The train itself, or at least the HA1 coach where I had my seat assigned, was one of the older generation Indian railway coaches. Not the shiny new Vande Bharat type. It had that old schoolness to it, and I mean that as a compliment. What surprised me was how clean it was kept. I have had past journeys where they hand you bedsheets and blankets that are questionable at best, but this time the linen was fresh, new, and in genuinely good condition. Small thing, but it sets the tone for the whole ride.
The way the coach was laid out worked in my favour. HA1 is a hybrid, part First AC and part Second AC. One side of my coach was the pantry car, and my cabin sat with the Second AC section slotted in between. That meant very few people had any reason to pass through. Nobody using it as a shortcut, nobody wandering. The only regular traffic was the IRCTC food vendors. Even the Second AC portion was running at maybe half occupancy, so there was none of the usual noise and ruckus you brace yourself for. It was quiet in a way I did not expect an Indian train to be.
The co passengers who never came
Here is where the nervous part of nervously excited turned into comedy.
I settled in and waited to meet the three strangers who would shape my journey. Nobody boarded my cabin at CSMT. I checked the chart online as the train left the station and saw that the other three berths were empty from CSMT to Panvel, with three people due to board there. There wasn’t much new to see while the train cut through the Mumbai suburbs, so I took a nap and waited for Panvel.
Surprise, nobody boarded at Panvel either.
By now the chart had updated again. The no shows had been cleared and reassigned. The new chart showed one person joining at Sangameshwar and two at Ratnagiri. You can guess how this went. None of them boarded either.
My theory is simple. There are enough trains running the Mumbai to Goa route, one every few hours or so, plus buses and flights, that people who had booked the Mandovi did not want to wait around for a train running this late. They just hopped onto whatever was leaving sooner. Whatever the reason, the result was that I had the entire cabin to myself from the starting station of CSMT all the way to the terminal at Madgaon. Fifteen hours, four berths, one passenger.
And it was not just my cabin. The whole train felt light. The Second AC section was near empty. When I stepped out for a minute at Ratnagiri to grab some snacks, even the sleeper and general coaches looked calm from the outside. I had packed myself ready for the crowded, chaotic Indian railways you see in videos. I did not get it. I got a private carriage instead.
Why the train kept stopping
This is where that 9:30am reschedule kept collecting its debt. A late train loses its priority, so we kept getting held at stations and loops to let the on time, higher priority trains pass. This is also down to the Konkan route itself, which runs largely on single track through this terrain, so there is not much room for a delayed train to make up time. It just keeps yielding.
I did not mind as much as I thought I would. The empty cabin was the trade for the delays, and I took it.
The view, and getting drunk on it
There was daylight from Mumbai all the way down to Ratnagiri, and that entire stretch gave me exactly what I had imagined the Konkan route would be, maybe a little better.
Every time the train punched out of a tunnel, the landscape on the other side would open up into something stunning. Lush forest one moment, then paddy fields stretching further than the eye can follow, streams swollen and running muddy brown with the western ghat runoff. And the bridges. The train would cross these viaducts built across V shaped valleys, a few hundred meters long, with fast water cutting through dense forest far below. The kind of arched bridge on tall piers that I had only ever seen in old Wild West movies, or lived alongside for years in my head playing Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2. Looking down into that forest, the thought did cross my mind that if anything ever went wrong out there, a search and rescue team would have a genuinely hard time finding anyone in that green. And looking straight down from the window, the tracks and the pillars holding us up disappeared from view completely, and for a moment it gave the dizzying illusion that the heavy iron carriages were just floating over the jungle canopy.
I spent the bulk of the daylight hours at the window with the camera running. I recorded from the moment we left the Mumbai suburbs until the sun went down somewhere around Ratnagiri, because every scene felt like it topped the last one and I did not want to miss any of it. At some point I hit a strange saturation, a kind of trance where I was almost fed up with the beauty of it. There is only so much sublime landscape you can absorb before your brain taps out.
When I was not at the window, I read. And I do feel a little guilty about the views I must have slept through, because I did drift off here and there. But I had also worn myself out recording, so I made my peace with it.
The rain was part of the whole thing. The cabin was isolated enough that no big sounds got in, but I could watch it. Rain rushing over the roof, drops sliding down the window, and the unlucky ones that managed to cling on getting swept clean off as the train picked up speed.
The book
I had packed three books for this trip. On this train I finished one of them, an Agatha Christie crime thriller called Towards Zero. I had already read a third of it on the way to Pune, on the flight and the airport waiting, but this ride gave me the uninterrupted hours to finish it clean. I cannot think of a better setting to binge read a book like that than an empty first class cabin sliding through rain soaked valleys. By the time I turned the last page I was craving more of it.
The food I was scared of
I had come prepared to not eat. I had stocked up on peanut bars and energy drinks in case the railway food was as bad as I feared. I need not have bothered.
The food on the Mandovi was genuinely good. Clean packaging, everything fresh, snacks that felt like they came straight off the pan. I never sat down to a proper breakfast, lunch or dinner in the conventional sense. I just grazed the whole way. Cups of tea, hot cheese and veg sandwiches, vada pav, whatever came down the aisle. And the vendors came through every twenty minutes or so, so staying fed was never a problem. It completely flipped my expectations of what eating on an Indian train would be like.
Five kilometers from the finish
The ending was not dramatic, and in a way that is the most fitting ending it could have had.
Because we were running so late, the halts to let priority trains pass continued right to the very end. The one that broke me was at Suravali, the last small station on the way, just five kilometers short of Madgaon. By then I had packed up everything. All the stuff I had selfishly spread out across the cabin I had taken for granted, now bundled back together, and I was more than ready to fall into a proper hotel bed. Not that the train berth was uncomfortable, it was fine, but after a week of Zostel dormitory bunks, then the half sleep I managed across six hours in the Namah sleeping pods at CSMT, then this sleep and sightseeing and reading loop on the train, I badly wanted a large bed I could just roll around in.
And there we sat. Thirty minutes halted at Suravali, five kilometers from the destination. That was the most frustrated I got the entire journey. I genuinely thought about getting down right there and taking an auto to the hotel. The only reason I did not was that I remembered the tragic opening of the recent Tamil movie Karuppu, set in an almost exact mirror image of this situation. I stayed put.
The train finally pulled into Madgaon Junction, the terminal, past midnight, now well into the second day. I stepped off at half past twelve, took a short auto ride to the hotel I had booked, checked in, and finally fell into that big comfortable bed around one in the morning.
Fifteen hours, one empty cabin, one finished book, a whole coast of monsoon landscape, and food I was foolish to be scared of. My first proper long solo train journey, and it set a bar the shorter ones never could.
