During the British period all railway connections to Assam and North Bengal were through the eastern part of Bengal. From 1878, the railway route from Kolkata, then called Calcutta, to Siliguri was in two laps. The first lap was a 185 km journey along the
Eastern Bengal State Railway from Calcutta Station (later renamed Sealdah) to Damookdeah Ghat on the southern bank of the
Padma River, then across the river in a ferry and the second lap of the train journey, which was a 336 km metre gauge line of the North Bengal Railway that linked Saraghat on the northern bank of the Padma to Siliguri. The 1.8 km long
Hardinge Bridge across the Padma came up in 1912. In 1926 the metre-gauge section north of the bridge was converted to broad gauge, and so the entire Calcutta-Siliguri route became broad-gauge. With the
partition of India, railway links outside Bangladesh were lost but Parbatipur continued to be an important railway junction. ==References==