How Nepal Learned to Move नेपालको यातायात सञ्जालको विकास

Nepal's railway age began ambitiously: the Nepal Government Railway opened on 16 February 1927, running 29 miles (≈47 km) of 2'6" narrow gauge from Raxaul on the Indian border through Birgunj, Parwanipur, Jitpur and Simara to Amlekhganj. It was surveyed and built in about a year by Martin & Co. of Calcutta for roughly 1.1 million Indian rupees under PM Chandra Shumsher, and its steam locomotives bore the names of gods — Pashupati and Guhyeshwari first, later Goraknath, Mahabir, Krishna, Sita-Ram and Sri Bishnu; seven locomotives, 12 coaches and 82 wagons in all.

The railway existed precisely because there was no road — travellers continued beyond Amlekhganj by lorry to Bhimphedi and then on foot — and the Tribhuvan Rajpath (1956) killed it within a decade of opening. By 1963/64 it ran at a loss; a 1965 World Bank study recommended abandonment; passenger service ended in June 1965 and the last freight ran on 13 April 1968, with a sporadic 5 km Birgunj–Raxaul shuttle clattering on into the late 1980s.

A second narrow-gauge line opened in December 1937 under PM Juddha Shumsher: Jaynagar (India) to Janakpur (29 km), with a 22 km extension to Bijalpura, built for IRs 680,000 primarily to haul timber — engineer Capt. Tilak Bahadur Rayamajhi, first locomotives the Berlin-built Rama and Seeta (1936). Because Janakpur is the Janaki temple city, it survived as a pilgrim line long after its freight rationale faded: ridership grew from 197,000 in 1960/61 to 1.4 million in 1977/78.

Decay set in through the 1980s–2000s (flood damage cut the Bijalpura branch in 2001), and on 20 January 2014 the line closed for gauge conversion after 76 years — leaving Nepal without an operating railway for the first time since 1927.

Its rebirth is genuinely the start of Nepal's second railway age. Rebuilt to 5'6" broad gauge with Indian funding (~Rs 10 billion) as phase 1 of the 68.7 km Jaynagar–Bardibas project, the 34.9 km Jaynagar–Kurtha section was flagged off by PMs Sher Bahadur Deuba and Narendra Modi on 2 April 2022, with public service from 3 April; Kurtha–Bijalpura (17.4 km) followed in 2023. Honest caveats: the service is short (52 km in Nepal), runs on two Indian-built DEMU trainsets (~Rs 1 billion) with Konkan Railway technical crew, and the final ~17 km to Bardibas — the link that would connect it to the East-West corridor — remains incomplete.

The planned trans-Tarai electric railway from Kakarbhitta to Gaddachauki was launched in the first flush of republican ambition — the Department of Railways was established on 16 June 2011 — with a length recorded as 945.244 km in project documents and 1,104 km in 2025 reporting that includes realignments (both figures are preserved here as a discrepancy).

Fifteen years on, the audit is sobering: about Rs 54.92 billion allocated over 16 years (~72% spent), work effectively limited to the Bardibas–Nijgadh segment (≈70 km), where roughly 50–68.6 km of trackbed and 16 bridges were reported complete by 2024–25 — but no track has been laid and no train runs. Land-compensation disputes have stopped several packages, one unresolved for six years, and the full cost is projected to exceed Rs 1 trillion. Even the government's framing has narrowed: the 2026 budget aims to finish Bardibas–Nijgadh and connect it to the Fast Track at Nijgadh.

The mooted Trans-Himalayan railway — ~540 km Shigatse–Kerung on the Chinese side, ≈72 km Kerung–Kathmandu in Nepal — is the most politically charged file in Nepali transport, reaffirmed at every Nepal–China summit since 2016. What exists is a feasibility study, funded by a Chinese grant of roughly Rs 3.4 billion (RMB 180.47 million), begun in December 2022 by the China Railway First Survey & Design Institute, with geological drilling finished by April 2026 and the report expected around the end of June 2026.

The engineering numbers are sobering: about 98.5% of the Nepali section would be tunnel or bridge, against a pre-feasibility cost estimate of US$2.75 billion — and the pre-feasibility work itself flagged doubts about the payback period and economic return. The honest status: study underway, Chinese-funded; no construction commitment, no financing model, no timeline. Any construction date is speculation.

A century ago Nepal had one of the most sophisticated materials-ropeway operations in Asia. The 22 km freight line from Dhorsing, near Bhimphedi, over the hills into Kathmandu (Teku/Matatirtha) was built under PM Chandra Shumsher — dated 1922 in most accounts, reportedly funded by Britain as a WWI gratitude gift, and per Nepali Times' archival reporting fully operational around 1927. Running on 106 steel trestles between 12 and 100 feet tall, it could move 8 tons per hour each way when new (down to about 5 t/h by 1955), lifting rice, salt, kerosene and construction goods into a roadless capital decades before a truck could make the trip. An earlier or parallel quarry line at Halchowk carried stone for palace construction, though its date is not reliably attested.

The old line ran until 8 April 1964 — the same day its replacement was inaugurated.

The American-built successor was even better: 42 km from Hetauda to Teku (42.3 km including terminals), built with USAID assistance, able to move about 220 tonnes a day — 'about 24 truckloads' — at half the cost of road transport. (Wikipedia's '22 tons daily' is almost certainly a mistranscription of the same statistic; the 220 t/day figure is used here with that conflict noted.) Electric, immune to landslides and fuel blockades, its finest hours came exactly when the highways failed: it kept Kathmandu supplied through the 1988–89 Indian blockade and the 1993 flood landslides.

That it died anyway in 1994 is one of Nepali transport policy's canonical cautionary tales: institutional neglect under the Nepal Transport Corporation, chronic underuse as trucking interests and tariff politics starved it of cargo, and a road-first policy that let a clean, cheap, domestically-powered freight system rot. The corporation was wound up in 2001; the towers and stations still stand, rusting. The Investment Board Nepal has studied reviving a Hetauda/Birgunj–Kathmandu cargo ropeway since 2017 — for instance to the Chobhar dry port — but nothing has been built: as of 2026 the country that pioneered Himalayan ropeways moves essentially zero freight by wire.

The trolleybus is Kathmandu's great what-if. Opened on 28 December 1975 as a gift from the People's Republic of China (~Rs 40 million, 22 trolleybuses adapted for left-hand traffic; the fleet later peaked at 32), the 13 km Tripureshwar–Suryabinayak line carried up to 10,000 passengers a day at its height and around 80% of Kathmandu–Bhaktapur passenger journeys — a clean electric transit spine installed at exactly the moment the Valley began growing explosively.

Everything that killed it was institutional: losses from 1989, mismanagement, wire theft, and competition and sabotage from private bus operators. Services were suspended on 19 December 2001, partially revived on 1 September 2003 on a truncated 5 km Tripureshwar–Koteshwor run under the municipality, ended in late November 2008, and were formally closed in November 2009 — sources split between the two years, so both are stated. The rusting buses at the Baneshwar depot became a Kathmandu landmark, and every contemporary plan for electric public transport in the Valley is written in the trolleybus's shadow.

Nepal's first commercial passenger cable car opened on 24 November 1998, inaugurated by Crown Prince Dipendra: a private project of the Chitawon Co-E Group using Doppelmayr (Austria) technology — the company's first installation in Nepal and second in South Asia. The 2,772 m line climbs 1,034 vertical metres from Kurintar (258 m, on the Prithvi Highway) to the Manakamana temple (1,302 m) in about ten minutes, replacing a 3–5 hour climb, with 31–34 six-seat gondolas moving roughly 600–660 passengers an hour and over a million riders — mostly pilgrims — each year.

It proved the model, and it makes a neat historical rhyme: sixty-five years after the state strung freight ropeways because there were no roads, a private company strung an Austrian gondola to a hilltop goddess because the road would never be worth building — and it worked instantly. Chandragiri (2016), Kalinchowk (2018), Annapurna/Sarangkot (2020) and a wave of newer lines followed, making Nepal one of South Asia's main cable-car markets: wires over mountains again, this time carrying people.