A carriage to India

These are the staggering statistics about India's railways... 8,000 stations, 14,000 trains, 40,000 miles of track, 1.5 million employees, 13 million passengers a day. But that's not how it seems at the rural halt where we get off one sunny morning just before noon. As the train trundles away to the heat-hazed horizon, the level crossing barriers jerk open behind it, and a pair of buffalo amble nonchalantly across the tracks, we try to adjust. After a six-hour journey from Delhi, we have hit a serious lull.

The station in Delhi was a chaos of crowds. Half of India seemed to be camped out on the platforms, while the other half queued for tickets. Now, 250 miles south near the town of Jhansi, we have the platform practically to ourselves. There are five trains a day here, and the next one is due in two hours.

All the same, three or four passengers have already turned up and are dozing in the midday sun. A businessman has spread a sheet on the platform, carefully folded his jacket, placed his neat black shoes next to him, and has settled down with his head on his briefcase. A group of women share a picnic out of tin tureens, spooning cold curry onto plates and passing it round. Half a dozen boys play cricket.

India always waits patiently. No frantic fretting here about late trains. A wait – one hour, two, who's counting? – is regarded as "unexpected time". Goats wander along the platform and one jumps up onto a bench and settles down.

Behind a verandah hung with potted plants, the stationmaster is having lunch in his dark office. Next to him is the ticket hatch with its useful slogan: "Two magic words. Please and Thanks."

There are more slogans – safety ones – all around the office, one for every day of the week. Monday's mantra is "The best

safety device is a careful man." On Wednesday: "Always alert – accident avert". On Friday: "Accident happens when safety ends." Sunday's is one for the techies: "Lever/button collar on will save a collision."

A poster of Gandhi is pinned to the wall, over the vast iron contraptions that regulate the line and are probably unchanged from the Victorian days when they were installed. Whatever Britain took from India, it gave it the most enduring and beguiling railway system in the world.

Travelling by train across the vast sub-continent is an experience every visitor should try. My wife Clare and I first tried it more than 20 years ago and were hooked. Well, put it another way, I was hooked. She enjoys the journeys, the time to sit and think... and you can do a lot of thinking on the longest Indian service: the Himsagar Express, which leaves the northern city of Jammu on Monday evening and, 2,300 miles later, pulls into Kanniyakumari, at the southern tip, the following Thursday night.

As I say, Clare enjoys the chance to sit and think, and read, and eat a lunch that will be delivered to your seat on a tray and will look pretty awful but taste delicious. And then the temptation to climb into the top bunk and doze the afternoon away, lulled by the rhythms of the train and the snores of other sleepers.

She enjoys the sociability of these journeys.

We generally travel in air-conditioned, second-class compartments, which have firmly padded seats and let-down bunks with curtains separating them from an open corridor. Travelling as a couple, we often find ourselves sharing the compartment with others – a businessman making urgent calls on his mobile phone, a Buddhist monk, a police officer who wants to discuss philosophy.

People can be eager to talk, particularly to westerners, who usually travel first class. First is a good bet for first-timers: you get a lockable cabin (though you may still have to share) and a nice class of retired brigadier who will tell you what a great thing the Raj was and how India has gone to the dogs ever since. In second class, young IT entrepreneurs will tell you what a great thing the dynamic new India is... "and which country do you come from, by the way?"

Clare loves all this, but she sometimes feels a bit more effort could be made to keep the toilets clean, and she gets very wistful about the idea of luxury Indian trains, or flying, or hiring a car and driver.

I have none of her doubts. There are few finer pleasures than piling out of a train at some 10-minute halt and buying bananas from a man with a cart piled high with them, or tea ("chai") from a man with a chrome urn – even if it's now generally served in flimsy plastic cups rather than the old clay cups, three dozen of which, in various misshapes, gather dust on top of one of our bookcases.

Another pleasure is joining a group that has gathered to watch as a food stall wallah methodically chops up onions. And then clambering back on to the train to check progress in the Trains at a Glance all-India timetable, with its handy list of concessionary fares – 75 per cent for kidney patients, 50 per cent for parents accompanying "child recipients of National Bravery Award", 50 per cent for "milk producers in parties of minimum 20" and variable rates for "Artists – theatrical, musical, concert, dancing, magician troupes".

We see none of those on our most recent trip, but on the way back to Delhi, I stand by the open door of the train and watch the lyrical landscape dawdle past: the huts, the haystacks, the workers in the fields, the water buffalo with egrets standing to white attention on their backs. At "cow dust time", the twilight half-hour, smoke wreathes across the fields, mingling into a gentle mist that gradually dissolves into night. There is nothing more magical.

Cox & Kings (020 7873 5000; www.coxandkings.co.uk) can organise tailor-made rail tours of India. Founded in 1758, it is the world's longest-established travel company and is an India expert.