Airdate: World’s Busiest Railway

Screening as part of SBS Celebrates Diwali season, World’s Busiest Railway is a 4 part travel documentary that goes behind the scenes of the supersized Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus to reveal how the station’s staff and technological systems are stretched to breaking point on a daily basis.

It’s a revealing journey into the everyday workings of an extraordinary station that’s a microcosm of India: congested, vibrant, hot, colourful and dangerous – organised chaos supported by a backbone of bureaucracy. With access to control rooms and signal boxes, driver’s cabs and engineering workshops, as well as the policemen, porters and dabba wallas who direct, help and feed travellers, this series tells the story of the megacity of Mumbai, its station and its transport challenges.

Episode One:
As Bombay’s population swells by tens of thousands each week, the railway and the people whose lives revolve around it struggle to cope with the pressure and the peaktime ‘super- dense crush load’. From the train driver to the illegal hawker and the homeless shoe-shine boy, each has a story to tell about this remarkable railway system, often described as the lifeline of India.

Wednesday, 16 November at 7.30pm on SBS