After conducting a year-long survey of landscape, possible routes and profitability, Macdonald Stephenson, a Scottish engineer, proposed the first Indian railway scheme in 1845. In his scheme of “triangulating India with railway” at a cost of about fifty million pounds, Stephenson presented an ambitious idea of setting up a vast railway network in order to connect Calcutta, Delhi, Bombay and Madras with other major towns in between. Regions east of Calcutta or eastern Bengal (later to become Bangladesh), along with Assam, were excluded from the purview.
