India🇮🇳Two visits to the holy Taj Mahal and a 9 hour train ride for the price of 7

Finally, the day had come: the Taj Mahal. An indescribably beautiful “building” made even more unique by the story surrounding it. The emperor was so in love with his third wife that he had the Taj Mahal built around her tomb. When he decided to build an identical but black Taj Mahal on the other side of the river for himself, his son imprisoned him. The son did allow him a small window in his cell that overlooked the Taj, which was still a fairly impressive “tomb”.

The next morning, I wanted to see the Taj Mahal for a second time, so I missed the morning train, which was already ungodly early (5 am). When I returned to my hostel at 10:30 am, I thought I would check if the train might have been delayed. BAM! Six hours delay. I quickly grabbed a tuk-tuk, and together with the people who had been waiting at the platform for six hours (ouch), we continued our journey.

The only available ticket cost 135 cents for a seven-hour journey. That was definitely not business class... And it turned out to be nine hours, for the same price. The eight-hour delay was just slightly above the average of four hours. There is an app that tracks the delay of all trains in real-time and shows exactly when each train is expected to arrive at the next station; an app that has become much more useful than the timetable. The reason for the many delays is that large parts of the Indian rail network are single-track. To score points, the government adds extra trains during election time, which only clogs the already overcrowded rail network even more. During my stay in India, the Indian government made a deal with Japan for the construction of some high-speed trains. The average Indian would probably benefit more from double-tracking the regular network though.

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