New Gitaldaha railway station is on the broad-gauge

Alipurduar–Bamanhat branch line The Alipurduar–Bamanhat branch line is an Indian railway line connecting with . This track is under the jurisdiction of Northeast Frontier Railway. History Cooch Behar State Railway The Cooch Behar State Railway (CBSR) was a narrow ga ...

. Gitaldaha was a railway station and is a defunct rail transit point on the India–Bangladesh border in Cooch Behar district in the Indian state of West Bengal. The corresponding point on the Bangladesh side is

Mogalhat Mogalhat ( bn, মোগলহাট) is a border railway station in Bangladesh, situated in Lalmonirhat District, in Rangpur Division. It is a defunct railway transit point on the Bangladesh-India border. History By the turn of the nineteenth ce ...

in Lalmonirhat District.

Railway links

The area was agog with railway activity in the 19th–20th century. The Assam Behar State Railway linked Parbatipur to

Katihar Katihar is a city situated in the eastern part of the state of Bihar in India. It is the regional headquarter of Katihar district. It is one of the important cities of Bihar. Also it's a main route of Delhi - Guwahati railway line. History Ka ...

, with a metre-gauge line in 1889. In the early 1900s, the

Eastern Bengal Railway The Eastern Bengal Railway (full name: "Eastern Bengal Railway Company"; shortened EBR) was one of the pioneering railway companies that operated from 1857 to 1942, in Bengal and Assam provinces of British India. History Formation The Eastern ...

extended railways to Lalmonirhat, Gitaldaha (via

Bamanhat Bamanhat is a neighbourhood and a gram panchayat in the Dinhata II CD block in the Dinhata subdivision of the Cooch Behar district, West Bengal, India. Geography Location Bamanhat is located at . Bamanhat I and Bamanhat II are gram pancha ...

Golokganj Golokganj (also spelt as Golakganj or Galakganj) is a census town in Dhubri district in the Indian state of Assam. Golakganj is one of the historical places of Dhubri district. Geography Golakganj is located at . It has an average elevation ...

and other places, thereby connecting Assam to Katihar, in Bihar, via North Bengal. In 1901 Cooch Behar State Railway built the narrow-gauge line from Gitaldaha to Jayanti, near the Bhutan border. Shortly thereafter, the line was upgraded to meter gauge. The Lalmonirhat–Mogalhat–Gitaldaha route was functional when India and Pakistan agreed in 1955 for resumption of railway traffic between the two countries, and it included movement of cross traffic via Mogalhat through the Eastern Bengal Railway. A portion of the bridge across the Dharla River at was washed away by floods in 1988. Prior to the

partition of India The Partition of British India in 1947 was the Partition (politics), change of political borders and the division of other assets that accompanied the dissolution of the British Raj in South Asia and the creation of two independent dominions: ...

, the prestigious

Assam Mail The Assam Mail was one of the better known metre-gauge trains in the Indian Railways system that was there from the pre-independence days. The train was discontinued in 1986 with the completion of the broad-gauge conversion of the metre-gauge l ...

used to travel from

Santahar Santahar ( bn, সান্তাহার) is a railway junction in Adamdighi Upazila in Bogra District of Rajshahi Division in Bangladesh. History From 1878, the railway route from Kolkata, then called Calcutta, to Siliguri was in two l ...

to Guwahati. The conversion of the 72 km-long

to broad gauge in 2007, and its subsequent recommissioning, had a station at New Gitaldaha. New Gitaldaha railway station serves Gitaldaha and the surrounding areas. The map alongside presents the position as it stands today (2020). The international border was not there when the railways were first laid in the area in the 19th-20th century. It came up in 1947. Since then, it has been an effort to live up to the new realities. The map is 'interactive' (the larger version) - it means that all the places shown in the map are linked in the full screen map.

References

{{Railway stations in West Bengal Railway stations in Cooch Behar district Defunct railway stations in India