My Complete Guide to India’s Kalka-Shimla Toy Train

Nooooo.

Disaster struck.

“No. No. No. No. No,” I wailed.

“Whatever’s the matter?” my mum asked, watching in bafflement as I sprinted across the living room and grabbed my laptop.

“The toy train!” I exclaimed. “I missed the toy train!”

I was due to be touching down in India in less than two months and tickets for the Kalka-to-Shimla mountain railway go on sale exactly 60 days ahead of their departure date. And the one thing I knew to be true about this railway? Tickets sell out within minutes.

This has been the thing I had been most excited about on our India trip, and yet, my ADHD-induced inability to set a reminder on my phone had meant that I’d missed the sales date by one single day.

“Whyyyyyyyy do I always do this?” I wailed, before immediately slipping into a flow state, spinning several plates, in my element, single-handedly navigating various Indian transportation sites, YouTube reviews of the different train carriages, and write-ups of the best options for travellers.

But let’s rewind for a second. Because what even is the Kalka-Shimla Toy Train and why was I so distressed about missing the opportunity to ride it?

This mountain railway has a lot of history behind it (so much so that it’s a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site), is a real feat of engineering, and offers up some impeccable views of the mountains of Northern India.

I’d read that it’s the absolute best way to travel to Shimla: gateway to the mountainous state of Himachal Pradesh.

Back in 1864, Shimla was the summer capital of British India, as its elevation of 2,270 metres (7,400 ft.) gave the colonial government a cooler place to work from when the plains became unbearably hot. The only problem was getting there: the train ride from Calcutta to Kalka took 38 hours to complete, and then officials would face an uncomfortable eight hours rattling their way along winding mountain roads in horse-drawn carriages. Building a railway between Kalka and Shimla, then, would make the journey significantly easier.

But, uh, how do you build a railway through such a mountainous landscape?

It certainly wasn’t easy!

Construction began in 1900 and was finished just three years later, with engineers having successfully drilled more than 100 tunnels through solid rock, built 864 bridges across deep valleys, and laid tracks around almost 1,000 tight mountain curves. All of this was done across some seriously challenging terrain while using the limited technology of the time. And did I mention that the track also climbs 1,400 metres (4,600 ft.) of elevation between Kalka and Shimla?

Some of the bridges are multi-storey stone structures built into steep hillsides; the longest tunnel stretches for more than a kilometre (3,750 ft.). At Barog, workers digging through sandstone encountered natural springs that had them working through torrents of water.

Unbelievably, more than 120 years later, the Kalka-Shimla mountain railway is still operating today, and trains still travel through those original tunnels and over many of the original bridges (some have been restored after landslides in the monsoon).

Needless to say, I had been desperate to ride these rails since I first read about them, but here I was, self-sabotaging again.

Perhaps it wasn’t all quite as disastrous as it seemed, though.

After loading IRCTC — the Indian Railways’ official website, there was still a small amount of availability left. The train we’d been planning to book — the Kalka-Shimla Express — was well and truly sold out, and when I tried to join the waitlist in case of cancellations, it told me we were solidly in positions 64 and 65. But there were a few other options.

There are five trains operating from Kalka to Shimla every day, and the departure times are particularly unpleasant, especially because there’s no well-reviewed accommodation in Kalka, so you’ll most likely be spending the night before in Chandigarh, an hour’s drive away.

Train name	Departure from Kalka	Arrival in Shimla
Kalka-Shimla Passenger (52457)	3:30 a.m.	8:50 a.m.
Shivalik Deluxe Express (52451)	5:45 a.m.	10:40 a.m.
Kalka-Shimla Express (52453)	6:20 a.m.	11:50 a.m.
Him Darshan Express (52459)	7:00 a.m.	12:20 p.m.
Himalayan Queen (52455)	11:55 a.m.	4:55 p.m.

It’s worth mentioning that timings are far more pleasant when you travel from Shimla to Kalka. This routing didn’t work for our trip as we were travelling up from New Delhi and venturing deeper into Himachal Pradesh after Shimla, but if you’re going in the opposite direction, you’ll have plenty of convenient options — the main downside will be potentially arriving after dark and missing some of those beautiful views, so do check when sunset is for the time of year you’ll be visiting.

Train name	Departure from Shimla	Arrival in Kalka
Shimla-Kalka Express (52458)	10:55 a.m.	4:15 p.m.
Shivalik Deluxe Express (52452)	2:15 p.m.	7:30 p.m.
Him Darshan Express (52460)	3:50 p.m.	9:05 p.m.
Shimla-Kalka Express (52454)	5:45 p.m.	11:00 p.m.

We had two options remaining: the Him Darshan Express or the Himalayan Queen (as we most definitely were not planning on setting our alarms for any time before 5 a.m.!)

And so began the lengthy process of trying to differentiate between the different types of train, which was easier said than done. Every guide we found said completely different things! Some said to sit on the right for the best views; others insisted the left was better. Some claimed the Him Darshan Express was the most comfortable train while others said it was most definitely the Shivalik Deluxe Express. LLM-generated content abounds, I wasn’t sure I could trust anything I read.

YouTube video reviews helped a little — not least because they weren’t slop-filled trash from people who have never set foot in India — and we soon realised the trains were much of a muchness. At one point, the Him Darshan Express was the most luxurious option, for example, but that was back in 2019 and after seven years of riding the rails, it’s just as tired as the rest of them.

Honestly, this is India! Bumbling around in confusion is all part of the experience here. But all that to say, here’s all the information I wish I’d had when I was panic-booking the Kalka-Shimla Toy Train:

• The best trains for most: The 6:20 a.m. Kalka-Shimla Express and the 7:00 a.m. Him Darshan Express are what you want to go for if you get the choice. Both are newer, higher-end trains, with much more comfortable seats. Our seats on the Him Darshan Express were so padded, reclinable, and comfortable that they made the journey really enjoyable. On other trains, passengers complain about how hard and small the bench-like seats are.
• No air con! Unless you’ll be travelling in the heat of summer, you do not want to take an air conditioned carriage. If you can’t open the windows of the car, you’ll likely be squinting through scratched, dirty glass and frustrated by the lack of a view. See the photo of me below for evidence of that. On the Him Darshan Express, our AC carriage had openable windows, thank goodness, but it’s not guaranteed.
• The Vistadome is only okay: Likewise, do not get excited by the prospect of booking a ticket in a vistadome carriage, which has a glass ceiling. Just like with the windows, you’ll be frustrated by how dirty the glass is, and it really doesn’t add much to the experience at all.
• Don’t expect an immaculate train: Don’t be fooled by any promotional photos of the trains, or photos/videos of what the trains looked like immediately after launching. In photos, the train we took looked pristine, but in reality, it was pretty dilapidated.
• The Himalayan Queen connects with Delhi: When we initially looked at the train timetable, I was certain we’d book the 11:55 a.m. Himalayan Queen, as it’s the only train that leaves at a sensible time. In reality, this is one of the more basic of the trains, with hard, uncomfortable seating and little room to stretch out. The main benefit of taking this train is that the Shatabdi Express (12011) from Delhi departs at 7:40 a.m. and arrives in Kalka at 11:40 a.m., meaning you can jump straight on the Toy Train and get yourself to Shimla on the same day.
• You can join a waitlist: If you happen to leave it too late, you can pay 278 INR to join a waitlist for any of the trains.
• But what about prices? It’s super-inexpensive! Prices range from 65 INR to 630 INR, which makes this beautiful journey such good value for money. We paid 630 INR each for a seat on the Him Darshan AC Vistadome.
• Sit on the right of the train: The Him Darshan Vistadome had a 2-1 layout, with the two seats on the left-hand side of the carriage. Being a couple, Dave and I obviously chose seats on that side of the train. I thought the views were so much better on the right-hand side! In reality, our train carriage was near-empty for the first half of the journey (we were there in October, so outside of peak tourist season) so we were free to move around the car to take our photos. It’s not a disaster if you end up sitting on the left, but I felt like the right-hand side had the best views for around 70% of the journey.
• July/August is risky: If you’ll be travelling in the monsoon season, there’s a small chance the train won’t be running. Landslides occur regularly in this part of the country and the railway is often suspended for several months every few years to perform repairs. Case in point: a landslide in August 2026 left a section of the track suspended in mid-air! The train has subsequently been cancelled for the past few months and it isn’t expect to start running again until January 2027.
• Wrap up warm in winter: The mountains of Himachal Pradesh are blanketed in snow during the winter months and temperatures in Shimla often fall below freezing in December and January. None of the trains have heating! You’re therefore going to want to wear plenty of warm clothes for the train ride and expect the windows to steam up. Odds are, you’ll be able to open the windows, though, as I doubt it’ll be any warmer inside than out.
• Try to avoid getting a seat beside the toilet. For obvious reasons! On our train, the toilet in our car was clean and didn’t smell at all, but elsewhere, horror stories abound. If possible, aim to book a seat in the centre of the carriage.

So to summarise, for most travellers, you’ll want to book either the Kalka-Shimla Express or Him Darshan Express.

In terms of accommodation, this is one of the few areas of India I’ve travelled to where the properties were uniformly poorly reviewed. If you’ve booked a super-early train, or don’t want to wake up an hour before the departure time, stay in Kalka the night before. Your best bet for accommodation here is going to be the Lotus Grand Akm. It doesn’t have the best reviews (7.5 on Booking), but is the closest hotel to the train station and just a five minute walk from the platforms.

We stayed in nearby Chandigarh for several reasons: there are far more accommodation options with much better reviews, Chandigarh is the shared capital of both Haryana and Punjab so has a lot to see, including a really eclectic rock sculpture garden, and, well, it just sounded a lot more interesting than Kalka did. We stayed at the Kaptain’s Retreat: a lovely budget hotel with friendly staff, fast Wi-Fi, a clean room, and a great location; we’d definitely stay there again.

Now, Chandigarh is roughly a 50-minute drive from Kalka, and you’ll probably want to aim to get to the train station half an hour before your departure time, just in case of delays or trouble ordering a taxi. We used the InDrive taxi app to travel to Kalka, as I generally prefer it to Uber in India (lower prices, easier to book a city-to-city ride). As you can see from my photos below, Kalka is far from a busy or vast train station, so you don’t need to worry about not having enough time to find your train or platform.

And there we were! Up at 5:30 a.m. and hoping that this would all be worth it.

Now, Dave and I had been a little apprehensive about our Toy Train experience in the lead-up to our trip, purely because we’d only been able to buy tickets in an AC carriage, and we knew we wanted to throw open those beaten-up windows to actually see the mountains. We were therefore silently celebrating when we boarded the train and it was more rundown than we’d expected. We could open the windows! In fact, every window in the carriage was already open.

We took our seats, five or six other people joined us in the carriage and then, at 7 o’clock on the dot, we set off.

We’d expected a packed train, overcrowded carriages, and the frustration of being stuck behind windows we couldn’t open. Instead, we had much of the carriage to ourselves, and the freedom to wander around and find the best vantage point for taking photos. After all the stress of securing tickets, things were finally looking up.

I carefully brandished my phone at the window, ready to start filling my camera roll, squinting at the screen as the morning sun dazzled my eyes. And, well, I don’t really know how to say this but, uh, the scenery was kind of underwhelming?

Dave and I tag-teamed between the left and right sides of the train, craning our necks, outstretching our arms, and struggling to catch a glimpse of the mountains. At every given moment, they were obscured by power lines, buildings, trees, and tunnels and it was impossible to capture the landscape with my camera.

I wondered if this was going to be a bit of an anticlimax, as I put my phone away and squinted into the hazy morning sunlight, wrinkling my nose while simultaneously attempting to practice the art of gratitude.

The Toy Train chugged us higher and higher, regardless, up into cooler air. Over our five-hour journey from Kalka to Shimla, we’d be ascending a total of 1,400 metres (4,700 ft.), and the climb in elevation was starting immediately.

I gasped when we rounded a corner, though, because there it was.

A vast valley stretched out in front of us: colourful mountainside homes beneath the tracks and layer upon layer of mountains fading into the mist. This is what I came for.

From there, things only got prettier.

As we began to wind our way around the steep mountain cliffs, the scenery only improved. One of the things I hadn’t expected was just how much the scenery would evolve across our journey. It makes sense, given that we were making a turn every 10 seconds, and each time we did, a slightly different view would emerge.

Of course, not every stretch was dramatic. Trees obscure the mountains some of the time, and if you’re sitting on the opposite side to the views, you’ll most likely be looking out at a litter-scattered hillside. Before you know it, another bend comes along, the valley reappears, and you’re back to taking as many photos as your phone can store.

And then there were the bridges and tunnels.

It’s impossible to read anything about the Kalka-to-Shimla Toy Train without hearing about what a feat of engineering its creation was. And I got it, sure. I understood that with the technology of the time, this unforgiving landscape would have been exceptionally difficult to build a railway through.

But it’s really so much more impressive when you get to experience it for yourself. It’s not until you’re actually trundling over 864 bridges, around 919 turns, and through 102 tunnels all over the space of five hours that you’re like damn, this is crazy that all of this was built in just three years. In the 1900s!

And all of these features mean you’re unlikely to get bored. I mean, we can do the maths here: for our 5 hour and 20 minute train journey, we would have crossed a bridge every 22 seconds on average. We rounded a bend every 20 seconds! Passed through a tunnel every three minutes.

The most famous of these is the Barog Tunnel.

As the legend goes, a British engineer called Colonel Barog was in charge of digging the longest tunnel on the route: over a kilometre in length! To save time, he decided to get two teams of workers to work from each end of the mountain and meet in the middle, theoretically reducing the construction time by half.

Barog’s calculations weren’t quite accurate enough, however, and the two teams missed each other and happily bored past the centre of the mountain. Barog was fined one rupee for wasting the railway company’s time and money, and the shame was too much for him to handle. In distress, he went for a walk to the entrance of the failed tunnel and shot himself in the head.

These days, the tunnel is reported to be haunted by his ghost. Supposedly friendly and harmless, people will tell stories of Colonel Barog sitting down beside them in the tunnel and having a conversation with them.

(The story is pretty heavily disputed, with no reports in the press at the time of a tunnel calculation mishap, a suicide of an engineer, or even of Colonel Barog’s existence!)

I will say that having a relatively empty carriage for most of our journey made a huge difference to our experience.

We could change seats, switch sides whenever the view changed, and take as many photos as we liked without feeling like we were getting in anyone’s way. It’s one of the reasons I’d recommend visiting in October, like we did. The monsoon has largely passed by this point, skies tend to be bluer, temperatures are still comfortable, and the summer crowds have mostly disappeared.

I’d also assumed that the vast majority of riders on the train would be just like me and Dave: tourists travelling the entire five-hour journey to Shimla. This wasn’t quite the case, though. At several of the little railway stations along the route, passengers would hop off while new ones climbed aboard. There wasn’t much opportunity to explore the stations we stopped at — and most of them were little more than a small platform with nobody standing on it — but we did stop for five minutes at Barog.

There, people disembarked to buy chai and snacks for the rest of the journey and take photos of the lengthy tunnel we were about to pass through.

As we progressed further into the journey, our carriage gradually filled. Towards the end, most of the chairs had somebody sitting in them. It didn’t really matter, though. We’d already spent the first couple of hours enjoying the views, taking hundreds of photographs and switching between the different vantage points. The other passengers were quiet, too, so the atmosphere remained surprisingly peaceful right up until we reached our destination.

We spotted Shimla for the first time half an hour before arriving. There it was: sprawling across the mountainside, its colourful buildings seemingly stacked on top of one another, clinging to the slopes at an elevation of around 2,200 metres (7,200 ft.). After hours of winding through forests and remote mountain valleys, seeing an entire city suddenly appear in front of us was a little unexpected.

It was around 20°C (68°F) when we arrived in Shimla: perfect weather for exploring a mountain town. After five hours sitting on board the train, we were more than ready to get out and start walking.

Now, arriving in Shimla is fairly simple. Just as in Kalka, the station is only used for the Toy Train, so it’s far from crowded. Getting to your accommodation, however, can be a little more complex.

As you can see from my photos, Shimla is built across the steep face of a mountain, and most of the historic town is perched right at the top of it. That’s most likely where you’ll be staying, but getting there can be tricky due to the combination of steep, narrow roads and pedestrianised streets. It’s because of this that I wouldn’t recommend taking a taxi to your accommodation. It’ll take a long time to get there, the driver may flat-out refuse to take you, and it may not be accessible by car anyway.

Instead, you’re going to want to make your way to the Lift. The Lift is an elevator that connects the lower parts of Shimla with the main tourist streets above, and it’s way faster and easier than driving up.

The Lift is around 1.5 km (1 mi.) from Shimla train station, so I recommend taking a taxi to the Lift on Cart Road, riding it skywards, walking along the connecting walkway, then boarding the second lift to Mall Road.

Welcome to the chaos: this pedestrianised street in Shimla is busy, busy, busy, and it can feel rather jarring after such a peaceful morning in the mountains. From here, you’ll likely want to walk to your accommodation. Just, uh, don’t be surprised if it feels more like a hike than a walk! Shimla’s connecting streets and staircases are extremely steep, and even a hotel that looks close on Google Maps can require a strenuous trek uphill. When you throw in the elevation, too, you’ll be huffing and puffing by the time you check in. Never fear: you can hire a porter if your luggage is heavy or you can’t be bothered to lug it uphill.

We stayed in a private room at the lovely Hosteller Shimla and would recommend it. I don’t stay in hostels these days, but it was so much better reviewed than anywhere else in the city and was in a good location, close enough to the lift and the main part of town, while also being quiet. Easy to check in, quiet and clean, good Wi-Fi, and our room had a great view over the valley — as did the rooftop cafe on the top-floor terrace!

Next up: my guide on how to spend your time in Shimla!