The line that carries today's Pune–Lonavala local is one of the oldest pieces of railway engineering in India, and it was never originally built for commuters at all.
The ghat that came first
In the 1850s the Great Indian Peninsula Railway faced the problem that has shaped Maharashtra's railways ever since: the Western Ghats. Getting a railway from the coastal plain at Karjat up to the Deccan plateau meant climbing roughly 550 metres of near-vertical escarpment. The Bhor Ghat incline, opened in 1863 after years of extraordinarily difficult and costly construction, solved it — and Lonavala sits at the top of that climb.
Pune was connected onward, and the Mumbai–Pune corridor became one of the busiest rail routes in the country. For over a century, Pune–Lonavala was simply the last stretch of that long-distance line.
Suburban service arrives
The change came on 11 March 1978, when Central Railway introduced electric multiple unit (EMU) trains on the 64 km between Pune Junction and Lonavala. The effect was immediate: end-to-end running time fell from about two and a half hours to roughly ninety minutes, and for the first time the towns along the route — Dehu Road, Talegaon, Vadgaon, Kamshet — became genuinely commutable to Pune.
Growth along the corridor
What followed was one of the clearest examples in India of a railway shaping a city. The industrial belt at Pimpri-Chinchwad grew along the line. Akurdi, Chinchwad and Dehu Road went from small settlements to dense suburbs. Talegaon became a satellite town. Today the corridor the EMU serves is effectively continuous urban Pune for well over half its length.
The rakes grew with it. The original nine-car formations were replaced by 12-car trains in March 2009, adding roughly a third more capacity per service.
The line today
Seventeen suburban services run each way over 17 stations, with a scheduled end-to-end time of about 80 to 90 minutes. The Pune suburban network as a whole carries in the region of a lakh passengers a day.
The section beyond Talegaon remains one of the most scenic short rail journeys in western India — the line runs past the Karla and Bhaja caves, within sight of Lohagad and Visapur forts, and into the monsoon greenery of the ghats around Malavli and Lonavala.
What is next
Proposals to extend and intensify Pune's suburban services — more frequent EMUs, additional lines, and better integration with Pune Metro at Pune Junction and Shivajinagar — have been discussed for years. Whatever eventually happens, the alignment those trains run on will still be the one surveyed in the 1850s.
Planning a trip along it? Start with the route map and station distances.