An Unusual Day Out on The Ooty Mountain Railway, 2004

James Waite visited Ooty in March 2004 and stumbled on an irregular working...

Much of the operation was totally normal, here we see the X class locos with the regular passenger trains over three days passing through Glendale tea estate a little below Coonoor, just a bit further up the line crossing the main road up from the plains and stopping the traffic in Coonoor, nothing out of the ordinary...

But then he had a stroke of luck, there was a works train scheduled to clear up miscellaneous items along the track - a working which occurs maybe at most two or three times a year. The bad news was that he had to buy a first class ticket to ride it. The good news was that it cost about GBP 1 and the crew were happy to do runpasts at normally inaccessible spots and provide cab rides...