Terry Martin has been travelling since he was a boy in the 1950s, his parents having abandoned seaside holidays in favour of rattling around Europe in a pre-War Jowett motor car. By his early teens he had become acquainted with the esoteric delights of the narrow gauge railways they had stumbled across in Austria, France and Spain, and when he began work in 1967, he bought a motorcycle with his first wage packet and began planning visits to the little-known countries of Eastern Europe.

The motorcycle was a second-hand Velocette he obtained for £20.00 from a police auction, and after clocking up 80,000 miles patrolling the streets of London, this unlikely machine was now coerced across the greatest barrier Man had built for his own inconvenience, the Iron Curtain. He found railways the authorities seemed to have forgotten as he toured the secretive lands of East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and continued into Austria before the exhausted motorcycle seized to a terminal halt. Continuing by rail to Yugoslavia, he travelled on and filmed the magnificent 760mm gauge systems of Bosnia and Herzegovina, meeting many people along the way who saw beyond the political dogma that haunted them. It was not long before he was able to return to these troubled lands and beyond on equally improbable machinery, finding beloved railways of incomparable character in the hidden corners of Europe.

His father had been a motorcycle dispatch rider on the notorious Khyber Pass during the Second World War, and inevitably a finger from India beckoned to the most fabulous of all railways to be found, the line to Darjeeling. He had first been aware of the railway as a boy, when he was taken by his parents to the Cinerama production “Seven Wonders of the World” in London. The film had certainly introduced its audience to some fantastic sights, but for him the highlight had been the railway climbing the flanks of the highest mountains on Earth. Its train had run into a sleeping elephant, and the crew and passengers had been so busy trying to coerce the animal off the track that they forgot to secure the brakes. Running backwards out of control, it plunged into a jungle before flying around impossible loops and see-sawing down improbable reverses. The film was speeded up of course, but as he sat clinched to his seat in wonder, he knew that one day he would be there.

However, his first visit to the sub-continent was in the company of eight friends who he convinced should ride 500cc Enfield motorcycles across the Himalayas and reach the summit of the Kardung la, which at 18,308 ft is the highest motorable road in the world. It was the first group of motorcyclists to ever have achieved this, and returning the following year to tour Darjeeling and Sikkim, he found an even greater challenge … researching the story of the incredible railway that had taken him there.

The results of this massive task were rewarded by the publication of Halfway to Heaven in 2000, an account of the DHR that has already become a much sought after classic of railway history. It also proved to be a key that opened the door to a wealth of memories from the many people whose lives have been touched by this extraordinary railway, including those who lived and worked on the railway from the days of the British Raj. He was encouraged to continue with his research, and in time exhumed an astonishing amount of material from long-forgotten collections and distant archives.

All this has been woven into The Iron Sherpa, the story of Darjeeling and its remarkable railway. It is a journey that has taken him many years, meeting many people across many lands, and is a story that we hope you will enjoy many times.