”A funny little, happy-go-lucky, native-managed railway,” Kipling’s condescending narrator calls the line that runs through Marwar Junction, in Rajasthan.

The two scoundrels in The Man Who Would Be King, his compelling tale about the delusions and temptations of empire, journey west from Marwar for their extraordinary and terrible adventures in “Kafiristan”, or northeast Afghanistan.

I didn’t go that way. A much prettier route turns its back on the Land of Death, as the area is not known in tourist brochures, and runs east up into the Aravalli Hills to the town of Deogarh. It is one of the great little romantic train journeys of the world.

The only way to work out what time the train leaves is to ask as many people as possible and average it out. Bring a good book (Kim or The Far Pavilions) and be prepared to wait around an hour or two. At the signal box outside town, we were assured that the train for Deogarh didn’t leave until 5pm. When we got to the station, we were told that the departure time was 2.30. It was already 2.35. In the event, it left just before 3pm.

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The station is suffocatingly hot, with all those signature odours of curry and cow dung intensified in the heavy, breathless air of the plains. You stare up at the green hills and long to be off. Everybody else stares at you, in that curious, entirely unaggressive Indian way.

Finally, the train trundles into view, the engine shimmering and the tracks wavy in the heat haze, moving at about the pace of an elderly donkey. There are hoots and whistles and lettings-off of steam, fond farewells all round. Mothers burden their sons with huge baskets of food to sustain them during the arduous two-hour journey, and we all scramble aboard.

Fabulously, there are box carriages, like in old movies. You are instantly part of a chatty little group of half a dozen locals, and the object of limitless fascination. What are you doing on this train? You, rich whiteys? We explain that we’re on the way up to stay at Deogarh castle. Nods all round. And we thought it would be fun to travel up there on the old steam train from Marwar.

Puzzled stares. Fun? The equivalent would be chatting to someone on the National Express coach from Swansea to Bridgend, only to find that they’re aboard for the sheer delight of the journey. You’d probably move away fast. The view from Marwar Junction, though, is a lot more evocative than the view of Port Talbot through a rain-streaked coach window.

Puzzlement turns to outright laughter at the sheer absurdity of life in general, and rich whiteys in particular, when they ask how you got here. There is no public bus service to Marwar Junction. The locals make it in ancient vans, pick-up trucks or on the Rajasthani equivalent of shanks’s pony. We explain that we have a car and a driver for the week. He dropped us off here and he’ll pick us up again at the top.

You have a car and a driver? Yes. A Mercedes? A Toyota, actually. Is it air-conditioned? Yes, it is. You can read their thoughts: you got your driver to let you out of your private, brand-new, air-conditioned car at Marwar Junction, so you could get on an ancient and unreliable train with hard, wooden bench seats and no doors or windows, operating on an entirely random timetable, which will take twice as long to get up to Deogarh as your car?

Er — yes.

The nice thing about this is the way our story instantly spreads tremendous gaiety throughout the entire carriage. It’s not that they think we’re stupid, we console ourselves. Just . . . different.

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