From Delhi: Taj Mahal & Agra Tour By Luxury Superfast Train

Why the train is the right call

The Gatimaan Express runs at 160 km/h and covers Delhi to Agra in a hundred minutes with catering served at the seat. The road takes three and a half to four hours on a good day and considerably worse coming back into Delhi on a Sunday evening.

That is four or five hours of your day returned, and you arrive at the monument able to walk rather than unfold.

Your driver takes you into Nizamuddin station and finds your coach and seat with you, which sounds trivial and is not — the platform boards are terse and a reserved coach in a fourteen-coach rake is never where you expect.

In Agra

A private 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, marble hauled 400 km from Makrana in Rajasthan.

The calligraphy on the great arch, cut in progressively larger letters so it reads the same height from the ground. The pietra dura inlay, up to sixty stones in one flower. The four minarets, tilted fractionally outward so an earthquake would take them away from the tomb. And Shah Jahan's own cenotaph — the only thing in the whole building set off the central axis, placed there by Aurangzeb.

Agra Fort. Akbar's red sandstone city of 1565 with his grandson's marble palaces inside, and the Musamman Burj, the tower where that grandson died a prisoner of his own son with the Taj in view along the water.

Then the evening Gatimaan back into Delhi.

Three options

A car-and-guide day for travellers already in Agra; or the all-inclusive day in second class or first class.

Practical

The Gatimaan does not run on Fridays, which is also the day the Taj is closed.

Seats are limited and released on a fixed schedule — book early, and carry the passport you booked with.