Station names!
The Hindu
The erstwhile Bombay-to-Madras rail route was filled with station names that were a mouthful!
Back then, there were no self-help books to teach you “speed-reading”. But you could learn it by reading the names of stations as the train sped by!
With elbows anchored on the train’s window sill, forehead pressed to the window bar, you had just a few seconds to read the station’s name. And if you had an elder sister on the adjoining window seat, it made for healthy and at times, ugly competition!
The erstwhile Bombay-to-Madras rail route was filled with station names that were a mouthful! You grandly announced Yerraguntla, Tadipatri, Guntakal and Hadapsar as the trains whizzed past them. Till the mid-1980s, the station boards had stayed unchanged for well over a century. You could faintly pick anglicised names such as Poona and Dhond over which the fresh coat of paint had the revised spellings Pune and Daund.