Why I Chose the Sleeper Train to Mysore Over a Flight

There's a particular romance to arriving somewhere already softened by the journey itself, rather than dropping from the sky bleary-eyed. I'd been thinking about this long before I booked my ticket to southern Karnataka, sketching out a route across South India over a flat white in Carlton. The flight from Melbourne to Bengaluru takes eleven hours, and maybe sixteen once you count queues at Tullamarine, the stopover, and the crawl through Bangalore traffic. The train, on paper, looked like the slow option. In practice, it became the only one worth considering.

I'd read enough travel essays to be wary of romanticising discomfort, but I'd also travelled enough to know that the moments I remember years later are rarely the ones spent in airports. Mysore had been calling since I saw a print of the palace at dawn in a gallery in Fitzroy. The question was how to get there from Bangalore without losing a day. A taxi was absurd in price, a bus too unpredictable. That left the overnight train, a system I'd heard described with a mix of dread and affection by every backpacker I'd met in a shared kitchen in Collingwood.

The cost differential sealed it. A low-cost flight between two Indian cities would set me back the equivalent of a decent dinner in Sydney's inner west, while the sleeper berth cost roughly the price of a smashed avocado at a Brunswick café. Flying in India means an early departure or a late arrival, neither appealing when you've already crossed the equator once that week. The train, departing Bengaluru in the early evening and pulling into Mysore before sunrise, lined up with my budget and my body.

I should say up front: I am not a hardcore rail enthusiast. I get motion sick on buses, fall asleep on planes, and had never slept upright in my life. What I wanted was a slower way to begin a trip, something that would let me arrive in Mysore already folded into the country, already recognising the smell of filter coffee on a station platform. The overnight train turned out to be all of that, and quite a bit more.

An Australian Appetite for Long Train Rides

Australia, for all its obsession with the car, has quietly cultivated a strong culture of long-distance rail travel. The Indian Pacific sweeps across the Nullarbor in three nights, and The Ghan climbs from Adelaide to Darwin through the red centre in a similar rhythm. Both journeys are sold on the idea that the travel itself is the attraction. I grew up hearing about the latter from my grandfather, who treated the Adelaide-Darwin run as a kind of pilgrimage, and I assumed I'd inherited some of that instinct.

When I started planning the India trip from my share house in Fitzroy, I kept coming back to that framing. Why was I willing to spend fourteen hours on a train from Sydney to Perth in concept, yet reluctant to spend seven on a train from Bengaluru to Mysore in practice? The difference was familiarity. I'd been conditioned to think of Indian Railways as something chaotic, while The Ghan is sold to me as civilised and safe. That conditioning, I decided, was largely marketing.

Booking the Sleeper Without Losing My Mind

Indian Railways runs more than twelve thousand services a day, and the booking platform rewards the patient. I booked my ticket about three weeks out from a coworking space in Melbourne, paying roughly forty Australian dollars for an air-conditioned three-tier berth. The alternative flight would have cost almost four times that, once you added baggage and taxis on either end. The classes stretch from unreserved second class up through sleeper class, AC three-tier, AC two-tier, and AC first.

The higher classes are quieter and considerably more expensive, but the magic of an overnight journey, at least for a first-timer, lives in the shared space. I picked AC three-tier because I wanted a roof, a locked door, and a guaranteed berth, but also the social texture of a shared coach. I wrote up the booking process in more detail over at The Traveloguer, partly because the system baffles almost everyone I know. For this route, booking ahead is not optional.

The Night Unfolds on the Bengaluru to Mysore Express

Bengaluru's main junction is the kind of place where the first impression is mostly sound. Porters shout, vendors press thermocol cups of chai into your hands, families spread out on the platform for evening meals, and somewhere a transistor plays a 1990s film song at full volume. I arrived about an hour before departure, having allowed what I thought was a comfortable margin and discovered was the bare minimum.

Boarding was orderly once the train pulled in. I had a middle berth in coach S4, which turned out to be a small mercy. The upper berth would have required a ladder, and the lower would have meant being a horizontal surface for everyone else's luggage. The middle gave me a view, a ceiling within reach, and enough space to read without a torch blinding my neighbours.

Dinner was a question of timing. Within twenty minutes of departure, walking sellers carried samosas, idli wrapped in leaves, and small steel tumblers of coffee down the corridor. I ate lemon rice from a parked vendor, drank a cup of chai that arrived without my ordering it, and watched Karnataka slide past the window in the half-light. By ten the corridor was mostly empty, by midnight the snoring had reached full orchestral potential, and by three in the morning I had stopped trying and started watching instead.

What You See From a Sleeper That You Cannot See From Above

The sleeper train gives you a window that doesn't end. From the air, the journey from Bengaluru to Mysore is roughly one hundred and forty kilometres of green and brown blur, occasionally punctuated by a town and a ring road. From the ground, the same distance is a slow reveal of Tamil Nadu's border country, then the first hills of the Mysore plateau, then the smell of eucalyptus giving way to coconut palms as the climate shifts.

I watched the moon set over a dry riverbed near Hosur. I watched dawn arrive in pieces across paddy fields being harvested by women in bright saris. I watched a small boy selling tea sprint alongside the moving train for thirty metres, his hand reaching up with a small pot, his face lit by the carriage lights. None of this is unique to Indian railways, but the railways give you access to all of it in a way no flight can.

Conversation happened without my initiating it. An older gentleman returning home after a medical appointment in Bengaluru asked where I was from and listened patiently while I explained the geography of southern Australia. He told me about his granddaughter's wedding, asked politely whether Australians ate dosa, and offered me a piece of jaggery from a tin. On a flight, he would have been a stranger. On the train, he was the trip's first lesson.

Arriving in Mysore Already Half-Awake

The train pulled into Mysore Junction a little after six in the morning, in a soft light that made the platform feel almost theatrical. I had slept perhaps three hours in broken pieces, but I felt alert in a way I never do after a night flight. The walk from the platform to the autorickshaw stand took ten minutes, and the ride to my hotel near the palace took another twenty. By seven-thirty I was drinking coffee in a courtyard, watching a peacock on the neighbour's wall, and already negotiating the day ahead.

The contrast with my usual flight arrivals was hard to ignore. Flying, I usually arrive shattered, dehydrated, and operating on airport time. The sleeper train, by contrast, handed me a city in the cool of the morning, before the heat and the traffic had asserted themselves. Mysore on a soft morning is a different city from Mysore at noon in March.

The train also gave me permission. Permission to read for three hours, to stare out the window, to fall asleep without apology, to be a stranger for the length of the journey and to step out as something closer to a traveller. Indian railways do this cheaply, frequently, and with an honesty about what travel actually is that no airline manages.

If you go, take a light blanket, pack water, bring something to read, and accept that you will probably not sleep much. Take the upper berth if you want peace, the lower if you want company, and the middle if you want the middle of all of these things. Most of all, take the train.