Nizam's Guaranteed State Railway

Secunderabad Railway Station (circa 1874)

Kacheguda Railway Station (circa 1922)

Hyderabad Deccan Railway Station (before 1905)

As Hyderabad was one of the largest princely states of India, the 6th Nizam of Hyderabad wanted to build a railway line to connect his realm with the rest of British India (now India). The proposal was for an initial railway line to be built from Secunderabad Railway Station in Hyderabad to Wadi Junction. Nizam agreed to fund the construction expenses for the initial line,[1] leaving subsequent branches to be financed through a variety of means. Construction commenced in 1870, and the Secunderabad-Wadi Line was completed in 1874. Between 1874 and 1889, this line was extended to Kazipet and then to Vijayawada.

In 1879, the Nizam of Hyderabad Mahbub Ali Khan, Asaf Jah VI took direct control of the company, integrating it into the state bureaucracy as the state-owned Nizam's Guaranteed State Railway.[2][3] This partial-nationalisation was reversed in 1883 when a management company was formed to gradually take over the lines, under the provision of a guarantee from the government of HEH, the Nizam of Hyderabad State. In 1899, the broad gauge connection between Bezwada (Vijayawada) and Madras (Chennai Central) opened, making rail travel between Hyderabad and Chennai possible. Railroad tracks in the state thus contained 467 miles on the broad gauge, all built before 1891, and 391 miles on the metre gauge, which were opened between 1899 and 1901. The total capital expenditure on the Nizam's State Railway at the end of 1904 was 4.3 crores. In that year, the net earnings were nearly 28 lakhs, or about 6​¹⁄₂ percent of the outlay.

In 1916, another railway terminus, Kachiguda Railway Station, was built to serve as the railway's headquarters.[4] The Nizam's railway was then divided into various, directly owned subcorporations. Each had a head official appointed by the Nizam's Railway. The profits of these rail lines were distributed by the Nizam's Railway.

The Hyderabad-Godavari Valley Railway was chartered to build a metre-gauge line between its namesake regions. In 1896, it appointed John Wallace Pringle — who had recently completed surveying routes for the Uganda railway[5] — as the superintending engineer. Four years later, the railway began service on the 391 miles (629 km) from Hyderabad city to Manmad Junction. The railway contained 467 miles (752 km) of broad gauge track and 391 miles (629 km) of narrow gauge track (meter gauge). The Hyderabad-Godavari Valley Railways costed 2.6 crores, and earned 7.7 lakhs net in the same year, or nearly 3 percent. In 1901 and 1902 the earnings were about 3​¹⁄₂ percent.

In the early twentieth century, the cotton industry held an important place in Nizam's Hyderabad Government as the largest export of Hyderabad State. In 1889, a cotton spinning mill and a weaving mill were erected in Aurangabad, employing a total of 700 people. In Jalna alone there were 9 cotton ginning factories and five cotton presses, with two more ginning factories at Aurangabad and Kannad. In 1901, the cotton presses and ginning factories employed a total of 1,016 people. The area of cultivated land under cotton in 1914 was three million acres (12,000 km²), with most of the cotton being grown in the Marathwada districts, where the soil was particularly well suited to it.[6]

The opening of the Hyderabad–Godavari Railway in October 1900 gave a great impetus to the growth of cotton in the Nizamabad, Nander, Parbhani and Aurangabad Districts, where many ginning and pressing factories came into existence as soon as heavy machinery could be brought there by rail. Bombay buyers began to arrive in considerable numbers during the cotton season, which lasted from October to December. As buyers paid more cash for the cotton and sent coolies to cut the cotton and bring it to the cotton marts, more land was used for farming cotton by the farmers. Hand gins gave place to ginning machines and farmers ceased to weed their fields carefully, cultivating only the best cotton. Grain and pulses then became more expensive, with much of the best land used for cotton farming, and Marathwada entered into a critical period of its history.[6]

According to a census report from the period: "The evolution from the agricultural to the manufacturing stage has already begun in Marathwara. When a country begins to produce the raw materials of manufacture in place of food crops, it has started on the road to industrialisation." There were three large spinning and weaving mills and about 90 small ginning and pressing factories in the State. The population employed by cotton spinning, sizing, and weaving in 1914 was 69,943 persons and by cotton ginning, cleaning, and pressing was 517,750 persons. The wages paid to the employees in these places were good, but the cost of living in Marathwara was very high owing to the many holdings that are put down in cotton, the uncertainty of rainfall, and availability of credit from money lenders.[7]