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

New Delhi: Exactly 160 years ago and four years before the great revolution of 1857, India's first passenger train chugged out of Bori Bunder, in what was then Bombay, for Thane, 34 kilometres away.

Google is celebrating the anniversary of this landmark event with a doodle on its India home page that shows a steam locomotive pulling a passenger train on a palm-lined track.

The first railway passenger journey in India happened on April 16, 1853. Three steam locomotives, Sultan, Sindh and Sahib, took 400 invited passengers in 14 carriages on a 57 minute journey.

While the Bombay-Thane line is generally seen as the birth of what is now one of the world's largest railway systems, the first railway line in India was laid a good 21 years earlier in 1832 near Chintadripet Bridge, now in Chennai.