Bangalore to Pondicherry

On Friday night, we took the overnight train from Bangalore to Pondicherry for a weekend get-away. Trains are widely used in India and are by far the most popular way to travel any distance in the country.

The Pondicherry train only runs on Friday & Saturday night -- which worked for us getting to there but not so much for getting back on Sunday (more on that later). This route just started in December 2008 and I guess it's not very popular --- the train holds 960 but they only sold 191 tickets.

All of the cars in our train were 3A sleepers - which means that they are (1) air-conditioned, and (2) that there are 3 tiers of bunks arranged in bays of six on one side of the aisle and bays of two (upper and lower bunks) on the other side of the aisle. The middle/lower bunks convert to seats for daytime travel.

Our train was scheduled to leave at 23:15 and arrive into Pondicherry at 9:30 the next morning. Friday was a festival day in Bangalore, so we couldn't book a taxi and had to rely on an auto-rickshaw --- so we left early just in case we had a problem hailing an auto. It ended up that we had no problem hailing an auto and we didn't hit any real traffic on the way to the rail station -- so we ended up there very early. Our train pulled into the station at 23:10 (a bit late) and we took off around 23:30. Our reserved seats were in a car with a bunch of very loud guys -- so after about 15 minutes we moved to another car. We were somehow skipped over by the attendant handing out pillows/sheets/blankets -- unfortunate because the train was very cold and it made sleeping a bit uncomfortable. Woke up about 7am when the food people came through the cars yelling out about coffee / chai for sale. Ended up arriving into Pondicherry on time. Definitely a good way to travel --- and much safer than the overnight buses.