Yelläks /ˈyæl•eks/

Sometimes it seems to be unbelievable for Europeans that it takes around two days to go from Delhi to Bangalore by train. The trains must be really slow and have to stop at every little train station. But it is really the case? While I travelled in trains I often just passed train stations without picking up the waiting people. Surely the trains are not that fast compared to the ICE in Germany, but they go steady even at night. The time must be wasted somewhere else. Therefore the question is: How big is India and what is the travelled distance?

If you compare the size of Europe and India on a world map, you will see that India is much smaller than Europe. A map is a 2D representation of a globe which is usually a body in 3 dimensions. So, how to display a 3D opject on a 2D plain? You can try it by yourself: Get an old ball (such as soccer ball). Try to cut it in a way that you get a squared flat surface without any foldings. You will see, it is impossible. So either you can cut the ball into many little slices and put them together or you can change the scale in the reagion, where a lot of ball material is left. If you examine a map closely, you will see that the lines of longitude/latitude are not straight although they are on the globe (going from north to south or from west to east). So the publishers of a map change the scale. They shrink it the closer the equator is with the effect that the countries near the equator look much smaller. The more the country is to one of the poles, the bigger is the representation.

Ok, enough of theory, here are some numbers: The distance between Delhi and Bangalore is 2061km (around 1288 miles). This is around the same distance from Cologne in Germany to Lisboa in Portugal or from San Francisco,CA, to Lubbock, TX.

To see the difference I used Google’s maps with the same scale and I laid the Indian map over the European one.

Is the Indian train really that slow?