The last of India's full-size, working steam trains are coming to the end of the line. So too is the working life of Natwarlal Vyas.
For the mechanic's assistant, who joined Indian Railways in 1964 when steam was still king, is due to retire soon after his beloved locomotives make their final journey.
"I feel sad at their passing", says Mr Vyas (59) who is based at one of India's oldest steam sheds, Wankaner in the western state of Gujarat. "When I first came here it was so busy, I never imagined it would close down one day. It's like someone near and dear is going".
Old age and hard commercial realities have caught up with Gujarat's four remaining operational steam locomotives. As elsewhere in India, the metre gauge track on which they run is being converted to the more stable broad gauge (rails with a distance of 5 ft 6 in between them).
The steam locos, whose range has shrunk to a 20-mile stretch between the towns of Wankaner and Morbi, will be replaced initially by diesel-run rail buses. Once rail conversion is completed next year, the more cost-effective diesel locos will take over.
When Gujarat's steam trains grind to a halt at the turn of the millennium, it will truly be the end of an era. Since the first railway was constructed in Bombay in 1853, steam trains have played a vital role in the shaping of the sub-continent. In doing so, they have also helped shape the consciousness of successive generations of Indians and of colonial rulers.
"India must be the one country where the railway is genuinely part of the folklore", wrote the veteran foreign correspondent, James Cameron, "a romantic institution seemingly built into its history". Indeed, India's development would not have been the same but for the railways which unified the country in a way soldiers and administrators could never have done alone.
Initially conceived for the part it could play in Britain's Great Imperial Task, the railway served to bring raw materials to the ports and carry British-manufactured goods to every corner of the sub-continent. The railway also transported the vast apparatus of colonial government, bringing weary officials to their far-flung outposts and, in the sweltering summer, those same officials and their long-suffering wives to the cool of the hill stations.
The only other surviving steam trains in India are the smaller ones specially designed for the hill railways of Nilgiri in the south and Darjeeling in the north east. Unlike Gujarat's steam trains, these now cater mainly for tourist traffic.
For the traveller to India, one of its most enduring images is of a steam train snaking through a burning landscape, its carriage roofs crammed with all manner of colourful humanity, portable livestock and bulging baggage.
That the steam trains have remained so long in service is testimony to the efficiency and ingenuity of Indian Railways. Until 10 years ago, there were some 4,000 steam locos still running in India. Manufacture of the steam engines only ceased in the early 1970s. Those in Wankaner date from the late 1950s and early 1960s.
In the 1960s, there were more than 60 steam locos operating out of Wankaner, pulling not just passenger carriages but also wagons of coal and salt. These commodities, essential to the porcelain industry of Gujarat's Saurashtra peninsula, were last hauled by steam locos in August.
Some of Wankaner's steam locos are rusting in a train graveyard behind the shed, smokebox doors open to reveal their tangled metal entrails. A couple of working models have been sold to collectors in the US.
Also hoping to acquire one is Dr Digvijay Singh, whose monstrous Indo-Gothic palace looms over Wankaner. "I'm promoting this as a tourist destination", says Dr Singh, whose grandfather was the last maharaja of Wankaner. "The train would be an attraction and a reminder of our heritage".
The former MP says it would also be "a kind of justice" to at last have a train of his own. When the princely rulers of Saurashtra were building their railways in the 1880s, Dr Singh's royal forbear lost out to a rival maharaja. Too young to rule when his father died, His Highness of Wankaner lost control of his lands to an agent of the British Crown who - in an act of perfidy not forgiven by his grandson - authorised the maharaja of Morbi to run a railway through neighbouring Wankaner.
By early next year, Gujarat's last steam trains will have joined the maharaja of Wankaner in the history books. And the shrill, breathy peep-peep of their whistles will never again be heard nor their billowing plumes of coal smoke seen on the Indian plains.