Moves to restore mountainous Khyber Pass line from the age of empire to win heritage prize
Pakistan is planning to use a triumph of British engineering to help secure a UNESCO World Heritage status for the Khyber Pass.
Over the course of five gruelling years from 1925, colonial workers built a railway that rose 2,000ft through the remote pass, which is a historical highway for marauding armies connecting Afghanistan to southern Asia.
Originally intended to carry troops to the frontier of the Raj, the line from Peshawar to the Afghan border cost the equivalent of £5m per mile.
After its military use, steam trains later carried day-trippers into the mountains, but declining tourism during the war on terror led to the abandonment of Pakistan’s only heritage railway.
Now Pakistani military men, who cut their teeth fighting India, are hoping to revive the line as part of a UNESCO bid, and to challenge their traditional rivals in the field of high-altitude heritage railways.
Maj Gen Ali Himid, who is leading efforts to restore the Khyber Pass line, wants his country to re-establish at least one of its heritage railways to keep up with India.
He said: “India has three such heritage railways. Pakistan has zero.”
Several million pounds of funding is needed for the project, but Maj Gen Himid said that the prospect of rivalling India’s mountain railways in Nilgiri, Shimla and Darjeeling had been “good leverage” in planning meetings.
These lines are a source of national pride for India and even featured in Hollywood films.
There is also a sense of urgency on the Pakistani side as two decades of disuse have left the 36 miles of track, along with 34 tunnels and 92 bridges, exposed to decay and landslides. Without intervention, there may be little of the line left to restore.
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It is believed that restoring the railway will support a planned attempt to have the Khyber Pass, the gateway to India for millennia, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. India currently has 45 such sites; Pakistan has six.
Maj Gen Himid has spent his retirement safeguarding Pakistan’s heritage, including the engineering feats of the British Empire.
With £10,000 of funding from the Commonwealth Heritage Forum charity, a detailed plan for restoring the railway has been devised and circulated among the influential figures in Pakistan’s military and bureaucracy.
One man trying to even out the numbers is Dr Abdul Samad, the director-general of archaeology and museums in the frontier province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. He recently managed to get five local historical sites on the UNESCO tentative list for world heritage sites.
Speaking at his home in Peshawar, he told The Telegraph: “The Khyber Pass is the best candidate for world heritage status [with its] intangible history and this railway line.
“It’s a wonderful candidate. The main thing that is missing so far is the railway track.”
UNESCO often favours complete and wide-ranging sites, with various stages of history still preserved, and it is understood that the current state of the disused British railway would count against any application.
It is hoped that a renewed pass could attract tourists, given the rich history which spans Aryan migrations that laid the foundation of Hinduism, and the invasion of Persians, Alexander the Great and Mughals.
However, the pass remains occasionally unstable, and there are some concerns that tourism could be affected by the actions of mountain tribesmen and the neighbouring Taliban.
However, railway authorities are open to the restoration plans, which are being advanced by Creative Co, a company founded by Dr Ali Jan, a travel writer and historian.
He accompanied Michael Palin on the Khyber Pass Railway when the former Python and unabashed railway enthusiast visited the region for the North by Northwest episode of his 2004 travelogue Himalaya.
Dr Jan said: “The Khyber is perhaps the most famous pass in the world. Its romance is timeless and the Khyber Railway is an integral part of its story: a remarkable feat of engineering from a century ago and a powerful piece of our shared British and Pakistani heritage.
“I bring international visitors here, and when I show them the abandoned tracks deteriorating due to neglect, I see how genuinely moved they are; it is tragic to think that a world-class attraction of such international appeal could simply be left to decay.”
He added: “The railway’s an integral thread in the wider cultural landscape of Khyber Pass, which brings together forts, archaeological sites, historic stations, museums, military posts and pickets along one of the world’s great historic corridors.
“This vintage rail revival adds considerable weight to the case for Unesco world heritage recognition.”
Dr Jan is also helping to restore the Christian cemetery in Peshawar, part of an ongoing effort to preserve burial sites founded in the colonial era.
A cemetery in the mountainous Malakand Pass, where some of Winston Churchill’s first fallen comrades are buried, has also been restored.
Reference Link:- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/09/05/raj-era-railway-pakistan-unesco-recognition/