If railway station Shelabagh, the place of orchards watered by shelas — hill streams in Pashto — can become the Garden of Sheila, the woman of easy virtue, then we have another place too.

On the line up into Quetta from the magnificently dramatic crack known as Chhapar Rift, in the Swiss roll-shaped hill, there was a station that British railway engineers called Mudgorge. It sat by the up or Quetta-side mouth of the tunnel known by the same name. Coming up through unstable rock and clay hills, this line laid in the 1880s was an endless headache for railway engineers. In the Rift itself, rockfalls were frequent during rains. Indeed, it was one such rockfall in July 1942 that finally defeated the engineers.

After some rain, gangmen checking the line in the Rift found a large section festooned across a gap. The war in Europe was on. The broad-gauge line up the contours of the Bolan Pass was through to Quetta, and they just let the ruined Chhapar Rift line be. Not much later, they dismantled it. The first line that had brought the beautiful, black, steam locomotives hauling their trains to Quetta, in March 1887, had come to end. With the closure of the Rift, what was once a main line was relegated to the status of a branch, running up from Sibi to Khost for passengers and another nine kilometres to Zardalu for coal from local mines.

Now, Mudgorge was so named because here the line, the tunnel and the station building sat on a clay hill. Some 200m of line was thus susceptible to mud flows during rainstorms. So regular and bothersome were these flows that railwaymen stationed here began to call the place “Madgorge”. But July 1942 spelled the end of it.

Fast forward to March 1993 when I went there for the first time. The scene was dramatic: it had rained heavily the day before, and the sky was piled with fleecy clouds. Here and there was yesterday’s rainfall in puddles and everything looked washed and clean. As I approached from the Quetta side, the station stood on the left. Sitting slightly above the level of where the line would have been, was the curving platform, but its concrete paving — if there ever were any — was gone. The line bed swept in a curve to the mouth of Mudgorge tunnel in the background. The landscape was entirely devoid of any vegetation whatsoever.

Historic names of places have interesting origins but face both deliberate and unintentional distortions

Outside the station was a black sign whose white lettering said in Urdu, ‘Mudguard Levies Post’. The uniformed levies man lounging about the otherwise deserted building told me that “Captain Sahib” had ordered the sign. He had no idea who this captain was, but I suspect he could have been a captain turned assistant commissioner or even a passing military man who did not like the Pashto pronunciation of Mudgorge.

In Pashto they called it Mudgaaj, with the accent on the second syllable. That is how local Pashtuns still know the place. Captain Sahib must have thought it an obvious mispronunciation and he was not wrong. But unlettered in railway history, the simple man did not know Mudgorge from mudguard.

Subsequent to that visit, I passed by several times and, on a couple of occasions, paused to shoot the breeze with the levies men and share their tea. I never told them the real name of the place, but I loved the place. It was a setting for a spaghetti western film. In 2010, I returned yet again. Horror of horrors, the station had been pulled down. The man loitering about the place said they were going to build a road through to Khost and the station was getting in the way. But the station was at least 50m from where they were laying the roadbed, why then did it have to be pulled down, I wailed.

The man had no idea. He also indicated that the tunnel too would be demolished to cut a gash through the clay hill.

I was devastated. Another bit of railway heritage was lost. I consoled myself with the thought that, even if there are no images of lonely old Mudgorge railway station in any archive, I have one 35mm transparency from 1993 to preserve an old memory and history. This image is part of a story in my book Prisoner on a Bus.

I came away wondering if, with the station gone, the name Mud or Madgorge, that was coined in the closing years of the 19th century, will be remembered. Or will it be Mudguard?

Backtrack to Bostan where the Chhapar line met the other one coming up from Quetta enroute to Chaman on the Afghan frontier. Tiny Bostan was once a busy junction. Here, while the Chaman and Quetta lines diverged from the Chhapar line, a new track took off on a north-easterly bearing.

Laid in the second decade of the 20th century, this was the lovely, narrow-gauge 185-km track to Zhob, or Fort Sandeman as it was known in those days. They called it Zhob Valley Railway or ZVR for short. That was when railway engineers dreamed of taking the track down from the heights of Zhob to Dera Ismail Khan, linking it with the line to Bannu on one side and the great web of steel rail across Punjab on the other. But some dreams are never destined to be realised.

Railway timetables, that once existed when North Western Railway ­— later Pakistan Western Railway and still later Pakistan Railway — ran, listed the fourth station up from Bostan as Toraghbargi. Since the once great system now only limps, there are no timetables, and outsiders do not know of the place.

The name correctly is Tor Ghabargai. Now, in Pashto tor is black and in the local dialect ghabargai is a small seasonal hill stream, perhaps much like the shelas that give their name to Shelabagh. Very likely, the waters of a stream washing the surrounding hills were laced with dark clay. British railway engineers mispronouncing an ancient title were evidently no Major Henry Raverty, a remarkable man of the 19th century who got into the innards of every name of a place that he heard. And so it was that the station got a meaningless name.

In 1985 or the year after, this line saw the last ever passenger service of the beautiful toy trains. For a couple of years, more chrome trains ran to the mines outside Muslimbagh. But then those too ground to a halt. The line with the highest aggregate altitude and length among narrow-gauge lines in the world was shut down and abandoned, its strikingly beautiful stations left to crumble.

In 1993, I saw at Muslimbagh a coal crane, with a plaque reading ‘The Great Indian Peninsular Railway’. The crane would have been shifted here when the peninsular railway upgraded to broad-gauge, sometime at the beginning of the 20th century. The crane now rests at the Golra Railway Museum, that owes everything to two admirable railwaymen, Ishfak Khattak and Hameed Razi.

At 1,793m above the sea, Muslimbagh station froze in winters. Then the furnace oil to refuel those beautiful black-and-red workhorses had to be heated in a boiler that stood in the loco yard. This antique piece never made it to the museum.

As for the name Muslimbagh, my copy of the 1967 ‘Pakistan Western Railway Time & Fare Table’ calls it ‘Hindubagh’. That too is a forgotten piece of our history. That year, in one fell swoop, a military dictator altered a thousand-year-old history. The next year, the timetable had ‘Muslimbagh’ and we quickly forgot what once was.

On the subject of names, though it has nothing to do with railways, there is a place in a very remote corner of Balochistan. The dirt road south from Nok Kundi in Chaghai district, cuts across the terrifying salt wasteland of Hamun-i-Mashkel. As one motors across it, one is overwhelmed by the desolation of the glittering, white, salt surface that stretches to the limit of human sight.

Just out of the southern end of this wilderness sits, right on the border of Iran, the tiny nondescript village of Gwalisthap. Now, if army men know their mudguards, they also know that ‘staap’ is the paindu Punjabi pronunciation of ‘stop’. And they also have that hopeless habit of abbreviating every word with more than seven letters. In 1987, the army’s signposts pointed to an almost obscene ‘G Stop’!

I wonder if they’ve finally got it right.

The writer is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and author of nine books on travel

Published in Dawn, EOS, April 19th, 2020