One of the two oil-fired steam locomotives at the workshop in Tiruchirapalli. A Telegraph picture

Tiruchirapalli (Tamil Nadu), Aug. 3: Darjeeling’s toy train is set to get more steam.

The train will soon puff through the Eastern Himalayan ranges with its two new “oil-fired steam locomotives”, the first of its kind, replacing its old coal-fired engines.

Christened “Himrathi” and “Himanand”, the two oil-fired steam locomotives, indigenously designed and built by Southern Railway’s Golden Rock Workshop (GOC) here, would make the 88-km journey from New Jalpaiguri to the queen of the hills “safer”, said GOC’s chief executive G.R.K. Raju.

Two azure blue engines wait on the workshop rails here, awaiting the outcome of trials currently on in the narrow gauge Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (DHR) with an earlier modified engine from this workshop.

The DHR was accorded world heritage status by Unesco in December 1999, which perhaps gave the steam engine “a last chance to survive” on the railway map, said Raju.

The oil-fired steam locomotives should give it a “longer lease”, he said.

The twin engines are expected to be moved to New Jalpaiguri by September-end.

Explaining how the locomotives were crucial for the DHR, which runs through picturesque mountain country and touches a maximum height of 7,400 feet at Ghoom, Raju said the Golden Rock workshop had first modified a coal-fired engine into an oil-fired loco. Extensive tests were then carried out.

Based on that experience, this workshop bagged the Railway Board’s order to manufacture oil-fired engines for DHR.

As DHR was “one of the most beautiful railway networks” in the world, with several loops and reverses en route, Raju said many tourists wanted to travel in the heritage train pulled by a steam locomotive.

The structure of DHR had to be borne in mind in “our designs”, pointed out Raju, who had earlier served the Eastern Railway for over eight years before coming here.

“In the coal-fired engine, maintaining the steam pressure, that eventually rotates the wheels, depends on the efficiency of the fireman who hauls in the coal and who would not do it right always. In the oil-fired steam locomotives, this human error factor can be eliminated,” said Raju.