No passenger has slept in a maharaja's carriage on the Palace on Wheels since the early 1990s. The princely saloons that made the train famous — teak-panelled boxes on wheels built between 1898 and 1936 for the rulers of Bhavnagar, Bikaner, Jodhpur, Jaipur and Mewar — were withdrawn because travellers complained that they rocked. Nine of them now sit on museum rails in Delhi.
That is not a debunking so much as a correction of emphasis. The carriages were real, they really did run in revenue tourist service for roughly a decade, and the reason they stopped is more interesting than the brochure version: a wooden-bodied coach built for a ruler who was never in a hurry makes a poor fit for a modern railway. The story of how the fleet was assembled, and how it was quietly replaced, is the most substantial piece of rolling-stock archaeology in Indian tourism.
A train assembled from survivors
The Palace on Wheels was not designed. It was collected. Through 1981 and the first weeks of 1982, Indian Railways and the Rajasthan Tourism Development Corporation went looking for what remained of the royal and official saloons that had worked the metre-gauge network of western India before the Second World War — vehicles belonging to the princely state railways and to the Bombay, Baroda & Central India Railway, many of which had been shunted into sidings and forgotten after independence.
What they found was enough for a train. The 1983 consist ran to twenty cars, of which thirteen were vintage saloons. Assembly and refurbishment took place at the Western Railway workshops at Ajmer, the same shops where several of the coaches had been built decades earlier. Every saloon was repainted into a single creamy-white livery with purple-brown lining — a scheme borrowed from the royal saloons of the Jaipur State Railway — and each carried the coat of arms of the railway it had come from, so the train read as a catalogue of vanished companies rather than a uniform fleet.
Sources differ slightly on the launch. The operator and most published accounts give 26 January 1982, Republic Day; the detailed enthusiast record of the rake puts the maiden voyage two days later, on 28 January. Either way, five promotional runs preceded the start of regular commercial operation in October 1982.
Whose carriages, exactly
The coaches were catalogued individually, and the list is specific enough to be checked. The oldest was CT 3, built in 1898 for the Bhavnagar State Railway and given a new, longer underframe in 1951. CT 10 was built at the Jodhpur shops in 1923 for the Maharaja of Bikaner — a connection that still resonates for anyone who has seen the fort at Bikaner. CT 9S, a Nawanagar state saloon of 1922, is associated with Ranjitsinhji, the cricketer who gave his name to the Ranji Trophy; its aide-de-camp's compartment was converted into a dining room in 1964.
From the Mewar line came CT 33065, described in the records as the Viceregal Saloon of 1900, built for the Maharana of Udaipur. The Jaipur State Railway supplied two vehicles dated 1936, including a lounge car rebuilt from a royal saloon of 1910 and then rebuilt again at Ajmer in 1964 after a fire, emerging with a steel body, panoramic windows and observation ends fitted with windscreen wipers. The Jodhpur State Railway contributed CT 43 of 1936, originally a senior officer's car whose open end platform was later enclosed.
One vehicle never quite fitted: CT 34756, a 1917 saloon from the Nizam's Guaranteed State Railway, hundreds of miles from Rajputana. How a Hyderabad coach ended up in a Rajasthan train was, by the account of those who documented it, something of a mystery even to the train's own officials.
Why the originals had to go
The romance had an engineering cost. The saloons had wooden bodies on original underframes, and proposals to fit modern frames were rejected precisely because that would have destroyed the vintage character. The train was restricted to 60 kph, and the combination of elderly suspension and uneven track produced a ride that passengers noticed. Indian Railways eventually cited repeated complaints about how the cars rocked in motion.
The replacement was not a compromise. A new metre-gauge, steel-bodied, air-conditioned rake was built by the Integral Coach Factory at Madras: fourteen saloons, two restaurant and kitchen cars, a bar-lounge car and four service cars, each saloon with four coupés and attached bathrooms. Accounts place the changeover at the turn of 1991–92; some give 1991, the detailed rolling-stock record gives the end of 1992.
Three trains in thirteen years
That second train lasted barely two and a half years. Indian Railways was converting the metre gauge of western India to broad gauge, and a metre-gauge tourist train had nowhere left to run. It was withdrawn in April 1995, and a broad-gauge Palace on Wheels — an altogether different train — began working that October, initially over a route that swung south through Gujarat before the itinerary settled into the Rajasthan circuit familiar today.
- 1898 — CT 3, the oldest saloon in the original rake, built for the Bhavnagar State Railway.
- 1900 — Viceregal saloon CT 33065 built for the Maharana of Udaipur.
- 1923 — CT 10 built at Jodhpur for the Maharaja of Bikaner.
- January 1982 — first run; regular service from October that year.
- 1991–92 — vintage saloons withdrawn; steel metre-gauge rake enters service.
- April 1995 — metre-gauge train withdrawn as gauge conversion advances.
- October 1995 — broad-gauge Palace on Wheels begins operating.
- 2009 — major interior and service refurbishment of the present train.
Where the maharajas' carriages are now
Nine of the original saloons — CT 3, CT 7S, CT 9S, CT 10, CT 17, CT 744, CT 34755, CT 34756 and CT 34757 — went to the National Rail Museum in Delhi, where they had arrived by late 1997. The account from that period is candid: they were lined up at the back of the site, a proposal to convert them into a hotel had gone nowhere, and they were already showing signs of neglect. At least one further vehicle, a saloon associated with the Bombay, Baroda & Central India Railway and dated by its current custodian to 1930, is displayed at the Heritage Transport Museum, 75 feet long and weighing 30 tonnes, with gilded glasswork ceilings and bath fittings with Austrian crystal handles.
The museum's greatest princely carriage never ran in the Palace on Wheels at all. The Mysore Maharaja's saloon of 1899, built at the Bangalore workshop of the Mysore State Railway on an underframe from Hurst Nelson of Britain, could be transferred between broad and metre gauge mid-journey without disturbing its occupants — one of the earliest vestibuled coaches in India, and a reminder that these vehicles were serious engineering, not merely furniture.
What the myth gets right
Strip away the claim of continuous descent and a real lineage remains. Indian rulers genuinely did commission personal saloons from the 1880s onward; the BB&CI royal train had grown by the early twentieth century into a 350-tonne formation of thirteen cars that needed double-heading. The impulse behind a private palace that moves is not an invention of the tourism industry — European monarchs indulged it too, as the history of Ludwig II's royal train and the sleeping cars of Georges Nagelmackers both show.
Travelling the idea today
The present Palace on Wheels is modern rolling stock decorated in the idiom of the states it is named for, running a circuit that takes in Jaipur, Ranthambore, Jaisalmer and Agra. Understanding that it is an homage rather than a relic makes it easier to judge against its peers: the Maharajas' Express, built to a larger and more contemporary specification, and the Deccan Odyssey, which works the Maharashtra and western coastal routes. For the wider picture of how these trains relate to one another, our survey of India's luxury trains is the place to start.
