Waiting for a toy train by a misty mountain tea garden

Tim McGirk takes a leisurely journey back in time on the Darjeeling Himalaya Railway

The gloom had settled on Ghoom. At 7,407ft up in the Himalayas, rising above bamboo jungles and an emerald mosaic of tea gardens, Ghoom is the highest narrow-gauge railway station in the world. It was also the gloomiest.

Two hours late, the next train on the Darjeeling Himalaya Railway was lost somewhere down the mountains in impenetrable mist. I peered inside the station master's window. His office was empty, save for an ancient telephone and a set of keys dangling above a rusty model of the tiny station. Pieces of slate on the railway timetable had flaked off, making it indecipherable. The only discernible figure of authority on the platform was a noisy red rooster.

I did not think the train would ever come. Boys were playing football between the tracks, the only flat ground in Ghoom, where a bad kick could send a ball sailing off a cliff into a 3,000ft free-fall. And when I saw a barber open up shop on the track I almost gave up hope. He sat his customer on one of the rails and began the intricate job of scraping away his ear wax with a long, lethal-looking skewer. It looked as if the de-waxing would take hours.

Many of the other Darjeeling-bound passengers - army men on short leave, Bihari labourers and a Tibetan trader carrying turquoise - and gold-coloured stones for artisan monks in the Buddhist monasteries further up the mountain - had lost patience and had clambered on to jeep taxis.

I had been warned. Ever since the British completed the 55-mile stretch of track between New Jalapiguri Station and Darjeeling in 1881, the engineers have engaged in an epic seasonal battle with monsoon rains. It dislodges giant boulders which hurtle on to the track. Sometimes the hillsides liquefy, spewing torrents of mud and felling trees. Or the railway bedding is washed away, leaving nothing but two twisted rails, dangling in nothingness. Landslides in June closed the track below Kurseong, a town at 4,787ft, which is a junction for estates with names like Margaret's Hope and Eden Glade, and is where they grow the finest Orange Pekoe tea.

The battle to keep open the full length of the Darjeeling Himalaya Railway (DHR) may be lost. It is not the monsoon which is killing off the Darjeeling toy train, as it is called, but the motor car. By train, the journey from the plains to Darjeeling can drag on for 13 hours. Speeding along by road takes only two-and-a-half hours.

The railway authorities plan to shut all but the final leg, running from Ghoom down to Darjeeling. This would reduce the hard-slogging mountain train to a pathetic tourist curio.

It would be a pity if it goes, for the Darjeeling rail is a marvel of engineering. It is also the most spectacular of the 28,000 miles of railway that criss-cross India. The DHR's three century-old steam locomotives loop, zig-zag and chug their way past waterfalls, Buddhist monasteries and vistas of Kangchenjunga, one of the highest Himalayan peaks.

The American writer and humourist, Mark Twain, was one of the first to visit Darjeeling by rail. Twain claimed he was told that at Sukna station an urgent telegram was once wired to Calcutta saying: "Tiger eating station master on front porch; telegraph instructions." The reply, unfortunately, was not recorded.

The railway united India better than any conquering army could have done. After the British laid the first railway in India, at Bombay in 1853, building track became a frenzied obsession. They stretched steel up and down the coastlines, across the heartland of the Ganges plains, and all the way up the Khyber Pass. Now, more than 10.5 million passengers ride Indian Rail every day, to more than 7,084 destinations.

The Darjeeling line was more than a scenic amusement. Britain's first colonial capital was Calcutta, and the Crown's administrators needed to escape the malaria and cholera which engulfed the city in monsoon. The fever line was reckoned to be 2,800ft; any higher, and malarial mosquitoes lose their sting. The hilltop of Darjeeling was their second choice. First, the British scouted Cherrapunji in the Khasi hills, but this was abandoned after they found that it had the heaviest rainfall in the world.

In construction, several tons of gunpowder were used every day to blast a spiralling line up the Himalayan foothills. The gauge is a narrow 24in, designed to assist the train up the curving slope. All this I learned from a pamphlet, Travelling to Darjeeling in 1944, and a few guidebooks I had time to read while waiting at Ghoom station.

I decided to warm myself with Darjeeling tea (the garden tasters drink it straight, no sugar or milk, but the Ghoom tea stall specialised in sweet, milky tea the colour of monsoon mud). Having finished my guidebooks, I had nothing better to do than watch the barber perform his magisterial de-waxing. He had moved on to the other ear.

Then the gloom lifted. The mist draping Ghoom was pulled aside, and the town was revealed, perched on a high ledge overlooking long, green spurs of hills - anywhere but the Himalayas they would be called large mountains - which fell off abruptly into the watery, blue haze of the plains.

And then I heard it. The train was coming. On a faraway bend of the mountain, I could see the whitish steam rising from the locomotive into the mist. It was as if that little locomotive, puffing and straining, were a cloud-manufacturing machine big enough to blanket the Himalayas. Twenty minutes later it pulled into Ghoom station. By then, the barber was collecting his rupees from a satisfied customer. Children danced around the engine, a B-class 0-4-0ST manufactured by the North British Locomotive Company of Glasgow in 1893, as it hissed and fumed.

The fare from Ghoom to Darjeeling, a distance of five miles, was only three rupees; I was not alone. Schoolchildren piled on the train, and as we left Ghoom at the famous Batasia loop, they all dashed out, picked flowers and raced across to hop back on as it finished the loop.

Sometimes travelling slowly has its advantages.

This is the latest report in our summer railways series