The clattering grew faster, carriage doors swinging open and shut, as the train rumbled into the countryside. Then, last weekend, he lost his Parliament seat to Imran Khan - the former sports star who has said the government should negotiate with the insurgents, not fight them.Īt Peshawar Station, the Awami Express slowly chugged out, brushing against the yawning canopies of gnarled trees and slicing through a crowded clothing market. Bilour himself at a rally in Peshawar’s old city. As election campaigning got under way recently, a Taliban suicide bomber nearly killed Mr. A few months later, in December, the Taliban assassinated his younger brother, the politician Bashir Bilour. Bilour’s case, the entire episode was for naught. “We don’t have money, engineers or locomotives.

“We are in crisis,” said Khair ul Bashar, the Peshawar stationmaster, surrounded by giant levers that switch the tracks.

The train company, lacking generators, could not offer any air-conditioning. Only one class of ticket, economy, was for sale. Porters scurried about in tattered uniforms, taking modest tips from a trickle of passengers.

It recalls the heyday of Pakistan’s railway raj, when the train was an elegant, popular mode of travel used by the wealthy and working classes alike, with liveried bearers carrying trays of tea, and pressed linen sheets and showers in the first-class carriages.īut the Awami Express, which waited at the platform, had little of that old-world charm. Khyber also gave its name to the country’s most famous train service, the Khyber Mail, immortalized by travel writers like Paul Theroux. Now that line is closed, its tracks washed away by floodwaters and too dangerous to run even if it were intact, given the insurgent violence. Until a few years ago, the tracks stretched up to the storied Khyber Pass, 30 miles to the west, where one of the last steam trains chugged through the tribal belt. The train system has been deeply affected.

Train to pakistan movie