This week’s postcard is a rather nice image of an Indian Army troop transport train, pulled up at a station, with the soldiers leaning out the windows of the carriage to pose for the photograph:

The side of the coach is painted up with the initials of King George VI and the words ‘Military Carriage’:

An Indian stands on the platform, just to the right, possibly a member of station staff:

The men looking out of the windows smile and pose for the camera:

Not all travel was on military trains, often officers travelled by the state railways on commercial services, as described here by E W Robinson-Horley:

I always enjoyed travelling by train in India. The trains had no corridors and a first class compartment occupied the whole width of the coach. Besides two lower berths and two upper ones that during the day were folded out of sight, the compartment had two large easy rattan chairs and a table as well as a loo and a shower cubicle. …

In hot weather travelling by train could be uncomfortable as there was no air conditioning, just a single fan which rotated noisily and for that reason was often switched off. At night it was adviseable to put up the shutters and to lock the doors, as railway thieves were a fairly active fraternity, and if they were not then the monkeys were. During daylight the little pests would await the arrival of a train at the station and, almost before it came to a halt, they would shin up onto the roof and passengers would soon see a row of upside down heads peering into the carriage in the hope of some tit bit or the chance of leaping through an unguarded window to seize anything that took their fancy.