Google doodles 160th anniversary of India's first passenger train

Visitors to the Google page on Tuesday will be taken on a short journey into the history of Indian railways, with a doodle marking "India's first passenger train".
The doodle has a train, pulled by a steam engine, chugging along over a background dotted with palm trees and a

structure in the distance.

Indeed, 16 April, 1853, was the day on which the first commercial passenger train left Mumbai's Bori Bunder for Thane.

The train; pulled by three locomotives - Sindh, Sultan, and Sahib; was greeted by a 21 gun salute when it was pulling out of the platform.

Google Doodle marks India's first passenger train

However, this was not the first train running in India. Railway lines for hauling materials had been laid as early as 1835. Most of the earliest railways were pulled by horses or men.

The first steam locomotive in the country was Thomason, commissioned in 1951 for hauling construction material in Roorkee for the Solani viaduct. It had a short life though, and was decommissioned after a boiler explosion within nine months.

The Indian government, in 1953, released a stamp to mark the hundred year anniversary of the event.