Bombay, Baroda & Central India Railway, Including Rajputana-Malwa Railway...

£2,500 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books

Rare and unrecorded quarterly information and fare guide for the Bombay, Baroda and Central India Railway (B.B.C.I.) and newly merged Rajputan-Malwa Railway from Bombay to Ferozepore, Delhi, Agra, Kanpur, Jodhpur, and Khandwa via Ajmer. Printed by the Rajputana-Malwa Railway Press, located in the famous Ajmer Workshops which would produce the first Indian steam locomotive just five years later in 1895, an obscure and little known press of which this copy is one of the few surviving publications testifying to its existence. The type faces and formats are enjoyably uneven and speak to the limited font that the press would have been able to utilise. Ajmer did have a mission press around the same time but there seems to be no mention of any change of name or proprietor, and the mission press has no history of railway publications. The contents, along with copious tables of the various lines and rates, contain the extensive rules and regulations of the railways at the time which reveal a wealth of cultural information. Such tidbits include: concession fares for travelling cricket teams, parcel charges for Bazaar supplies, prices of ice boxes, bicycle luggage rates, 11 pages of regulations for transporting pets and livestock, restrictions on imports of opium, and more besides. Ajmer, and its workshops, stayed as the crux of the lines of the B.B.C.I. due to its situation at junction of changes in gauge. In 1889 the management of the metre gauge Rajputana–Malwa Railway (earlier known

• Binding: Hardcover

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.