From Delhi: Private Taj Mahal & Agra Tour By SuperFast Train

Breakfast on the train, and why that matters

The Gatimaan Express is one of the few Indian trains where catering is included in the fare and served at your seat — a hot breakfast, brought round, on a train doing 160 km/h. Delhi to Agra takes a hundred minutes.

Compared with the road version of this day trip it hands you four or five hours back and you arrive having eaten rather than having sat in a car since five in the morning.

In Agra

A private air-conditioned car and a licensed guide take over at Agra Cantt.

Taj Mahal. Shah Jahan began it in 1632, the year after Mumtaz Mahal died bearing their fourteenth child. Twenty thousand workers, twenty-two years, and marble carted 400 km from Makrana in Rajasthan.

What a guide gives you: the calligraphy on the great arch, cut in progressively larger letters so that from the ground every line reads the same height; the pietra dura inlay, where one flower can hold sixty separate stones; the four minarets, tilted fractionally outward so an earthquake would drop them away from the tomb; and the illusion at the gateway, where the building appears to shrink as you approach.

And the single asymmetry in a composition mirrored to the millimetre: Shah Jahan's own cenotaph, placed off the central axis by Aurangzeb.

Agra Fort. Akbar's red sandstone city of 1565 with his grandson's marble palaces inside — the Diwan-i-Am, the Khas Mahal, the Sheesh Mahal — and the Musamman Burj, the tower where that grandson spent his last eight years as a prisoner of his own son.

Then the evening Gatimaan back into Delhi.

Three options

Car, guide and second-class seats without tickets or lunch; the same with entrances and a five-star lunch; or first class with everything included.

Practical

About fourteen hours door to door. The Gatimaan does not run on Fridays, which is also the day the Taj is closed.

Seats are limited — book early, and carry the passport you booked with.