History
The Western Railway was created on November 5, 1951 by the merger of several state-owned railways, including the Bombay, Baroda, and Central India Railway (BB&CI), and the Saurashtra Railway, Rajputana Railway and Jaipur State Railway. The narrow gauge lines of Cutch State Railway was also merged into it in 1951.
The BB&CI Railway was itself inaugurated in 1855, starting with the construction of a 29-mile (47-km) broad gauge track from Ankleshwar to Utran in Gujarat state on the west coast. In 1864, the railway was extended to Mumbai.
Subsequently, the project was further extended beyond Vadodara in a north easterly direction towards Godhra, Ratlam, Nagda and thereafter northwards towards Kota and Mathura, to eventually link with the Great Indian Peninsular Railway, now the Central Railway, which had already started operating in Mumbai in 1853. In 1883, a metre gauge railway system, initially linking Delhi with Agra, Jaipur and Ajmer, was established.
The first suburban service in Mumbai with steam traction was introduced in April 1867. It was extended to Churchgate in 1870. By 1900 45 trains in each direction were carrying over one million passengers annually.
The railways of several princely states were also integrated into the Western Railway. The Gaekwars of Baroda built the Gaekwar's Baroda State Railway (GBSR), which was merged into the BB&CI in 1949. Several railways of western Gujarat, including the Bhavnagar, Kathiawar, Jamnagar & Dwarka, Gondal, and Morvi railways were merged into the Saurashtra Railway in 1948. The Jodhpur and Bikaner Railway was taken over by Rajasthan state in 1949, after the western portion was ceded to the government of Pakistan.
In 2002, the Jaipur and Ajmer divisions of the Western Railway became part of the newly-created North Western Railway, and in April 2003 the Kota division of the Western Railway became part of the newly-created West Central Railway.
Read more about this topic: Western Railway Zone
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