Industrial Locomotives of South Asia (ILSA)

Compiled by Simon Darvill

First edition 2000; Revised August 2004.

Changes to Lists


SAN Locomotives 

David Love kindly supplied me with a SAN workslist. I have added the locos by state. SAN built over 500 locos from 1971 to 
1998 (the end date of the workslist - SAN have no doubt built more locos in the last five years). This has added considerably
to the known information of current industrial locations in India.

Preserved railways

These are by state and country. Almost all of the historical information is from the Indian Locomotives series of books. 
Railways in pleasure parks, mainly Bal Bhavans - I think that this means children's park - can somebody confirm this for me?

Historical information for agents

A lot of information has been added in this section from trade magazines such as Indian Railway Gazette and Indian 
Engineering. (I have only looked at the issues listed in the bibliography - if anybody knows where there are further issues 
of these I would be very pleased to hear.) The main agents that I have been able to find out anything about the delivery of 
materials onwards from them are Decauville and Oreinstien and Koppel.

Other background historical information

There is additional information from State Gazetteers. I have not really done this as much as I would have liked to. It 
tends to be obtained in the time whilst waiting for manuscripts from the India Office collection that I get to read the 
Gazetteers. I hope to add more of this in the future. I have added one or two documents that I think are worth seeing in full. 
Information from trade journals, adverts and other such miscellany have also been added.

Military railways

I have added a section about military railways. Currently, this is an article about railways on the NOrth Western Frontier 
from 1880 to 1917. To follow this at some vauge point in the future are other articles about the use of Indian narrow gauge
railway equipment in Persia and Mesopotamia in the First World War, the use of metre gauge railways in military campaigns from 
the 1860s onwards and post world war one military railways. The article is a work in progress but at a point where it finally
makes coherent sense. If anybody can add further to it or correct any errors that there may be in it (especially from a 
military history point of view), please let me know.

Steel and coal industries

The way that I have evovled this information is on a industry wide basis. There are large nationwide government instigated 
companies who operate these industries. There are however many other companies in the field. This is further complicated by 
the addition of historical information. All of this meant that a number of years ago I took the decison to base the information 
for these two industries on this indsutry wide basis.

As my reasearches have furthered, I have come to the realsiation that all Indian industry post 1947 is worked on nationwide 
basis, with a share of the market for the "real" private companies. I have now started to do sepreate company lists, in the 
same vein as the coal and steel for each type of industry that used railways. This will be the next edition of these pages.

Unknowns

I have managed (with the use of lots of web searching) to be able to put over 50% of entries that were formerly on an 
unknowns page in to their correct states. Any further pointers or information here would be welcome.