From Delhi: Taj Mahal & Agra Trip by Gatimaan Express Train

06:00 pickup, 08:10 departure, Agra by ten

The Gatimaan Express runs Delhi to Agra at 160 km/h — India's fastest train, a hundred minutes, with refreshments served at the seat. It turns a four-hour drive each way into something you barely notice.

The morning

Pickup from your hotel or residence in Delhi, then Hazrat Nizamuddin station. Reserved AC seating, breakfast on board.

In Agra

A private air-conditioned car and a licensed local guide meet you at Agra Cantt.

Taj Mahal first. Shah Jahan began it in 1632, the year after Mumtaz Mahal died bearing their fourteenth child; twenty thousand workers, twenty-two years, marble hauled 300 km from Makrana in Rajasthan.

What a guide gives you here is the craft rather than the romance: the calligraphy on the great arch, cut in progressively larger letters so it reads the same height from the ground; the pietra dura, with as many as sixty stones in one inlaid flower; the four minarets, leaning fractionally outward so that an earthquake would drop them away from the tomb; and the illusion at the gateway, where the building seems to shrink as you walk toward it.

And the single asymmetry in a perfectly mirrored composition — Shah Jahan's own cenotaph, set off the central axis by Aurangzeb.

Agra Fort afterwards: Akbar's red sandstone city of 1565 with his grandson's marble palaces inside, and the Musamman Burj where that grandson spent his last eight years as a prisoner of his own son.

Lunch, then the evening Gatimaan back into Delhi.

Three options

Chair car with car and guide; all-inclusive chair car with tickets and lunch; or executive chair car all-inclusive.

Practical

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

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