An Ambassador Classic and a Darjeeling Himalayan Railway locomotive occupy pride of place in Adrian Shooter's English garden
A maroon Hindustan Ambassador sparkles in the glorious summer sun in front of the picturesque Heyford railway station in north Oxfordshire. While bumping into Indians at every corner in the UK is quite usual, having the good old bulbous Indian car waiting at a quaint station by the Oxford Canal comes as a pleasant surprise. The surprise lasts till you meet its owner, Adrian Shooter, the former chairman of Chiltern Railways, a British train operating company.
Fifteen years ago, Shooter bought an “arts and crafts” style house in Steeple Aston village, shipped in a Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (DHR) steam locomotive and set up his own private railway—the Beeches Light Railway—in his three-acre garden. The 1889 British-built steam engine, used in the Darjeeling hills in India till 1962, was bought from a private collector in Chicago.
The Ambassador is a fancy of the man in love with all machines old.
“This is an interesting car,” he says, wondering how the early Indian car, modelled on the British Morris Oxford of the 1950s, survived so long—its journey from a status symbol of the rich to the humble taxi—without changing much. There have been “two big improvements”, says Shooter, a mechanical engineer in love with motion. “The disc brakes are very effective and much better than would have been the case in the ’50s. The other is the five-speed gearbox which, although being a bit ‘agricultural’ [crude], does mean that cruising at higher speeds is much more relaxing.”
A narrow lane off Heyford Road leads to his house. Once inside his garden, Shooter drives his 2003 Ambassador Classic with a 1.8-litre petrol engine alongside the narrow-gauge rail tracks. On some stretches, the Amby goes over the tree-lined tracks. The drive tries to simulate the 78-kilometre journey from Siliguri to Darjeeling, where the DHR (more fondly known as the Toy Train) and the Hill Cart Road crisscross.
The topographies of Darjeeling and Oxfordshire have little in common, but Shooter has tried to give an authentic feel wherever possible, for instance, the tracks are looped to form the figure eight. Before long, he pulls up in front of the Rinkingpong Road station of his garden railway, named after a road in Kalimpong, a hill station close to Darjeeling in West Bengal, India.
The couple is now planning a rally with their Ambassador in India in November 2015. The plan is to drive with 20 other Ambassador owners from Kolkata to Siliguri and then uphill to Darjeeling. They then plan to enter Bhutan via Phuentsholing, drive to east Bhutan and return to India via Guwahati.
When he was in Kolkata in 2006, Shooter visited the Hindustan Motors factory at Uttarpara, an experience he recounts with a smile. “We wanted to visit the factory but had not made any arrangements,” he says, narrating how the great Indian jugaad tradition made the visit possible.
(This story appears in the July-Aug 2014 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)