The Cleanest  Railway Station

Many years back I travelled to Shimla. As you know, Shimla is a Hill Station located  2276 meters over mean sea level.  For travelling to Shimla by train , one has to reach a station called Kalka and from Kalka to Shimla, there is a Himalayan train, which they say, you can detrain yourself  from the running train , walk and board the running train again !!

So all of us including  my wife had reached Kalka station from Delhi and were waiting for the Himalayan train to arrive on the platform.  The platform was absolutely clean - no  traces of papers, cigarette buns, wrappers of biscuits or anything else. As against this clean railway station, I remembered one of the most dirty station,  Ratlam.  

Nothing else to  do , while waiting for the train , we decided to take long walk along the clean railway platform.

As  we  took the walk, a passenger little ahead of us, removed the peel of a banana, ate the banana and just threw away the peel on the platform itself. Wondering how a person could be so careless,  anybody who put his feet over the peel would surely touch the ground.

Just then , a Ticket Checker, who was just ahead of us bent down , picked up the peel and threw it away in a dust bin. Surely the passenger, who threw the peel,  should have done it, as the dust bin was near him.

The sight of the  ticket checker picking up the peel and finding its way to the dust bin really moved me.  I caught up with the ticket checker and praised him for his activity.

“ I would like to record it in  railways complimentary  book.” I said honestly.

The ticket checker could not believe that somebody has complimented him. Rare it is ! Coming back to the senses, he thanked me and took me eagerly to the Station Master’s office.

I complimented the Station Master about the cleanliness of the station and the ticket checker’s promptness in picking up the peel and discarding it in the dustbin.

“ I would like to record my observations “, I said.

“ But we do not have Complimentary Book. We have Complaint Book. “ he said.

“ Nevermind” , I said. “ We will record it in the Complaint book , but with a big title that this is not a complaint but a Compliment. “

The Station Master gladly brought  the Complaint Book for me to record my Compliments.

I recorded my observations and handed over the Complaint Book to the Station Master. By this time, most of ticket checking staff had gathered around us .  It was nice to see  glow of warmth on the faces of all the staff.

By then, the Himalayan train had already arrived on the station. Thanking all the railway staff for their effort to clean the railway station, I boarded the train.  We enjoyed during our journey the full attention of the railway staff.

One thing to learn from this incident : For most of us, we are very keen to make complaint, but rarely thank for the good deed by others.    We should always do it.

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