NDA (I) 2018 General Ability Test · Question 94 of 150

Correct — C, Hajipur. Hajipur, in the Vaishali district of Bihar just across the Ganga from Patna, is the headquarters of the East Central Railway. That zone was created in 1996 and covers most of Bihar and Jharkhand along with a stretch of eastern Uttar Pradesh, through its divisions at Danapur, Dhanbad, Samastipur, Sonpur and Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Junction. Of the four towns listed, Hajipur is the only one that carries a zonal headquarters; the other three are busy railway centres, but the offices they host are divisional, not zonal.

• (a)Kanpur — Kanpur is one of the busiest junctions in the country and a major workshop town, which makes it feel like an obvious candidate, but no zone of Indian Railways is headquartered there.
• (b)Lucknow — The sharpest distractor. Lucknow does host railway headquarters — but divisional ones, and unusually it hosts a division of the Northern Railway and a division of the North Eastern Railway. The North Eastern Railway's zonal headquarters, however, is at Gorakhpur, not Lucknow.
• (d)New Jalpaiguri — New Jalpaiguri is the gateway junction for Sikkim, Darjeeling and the whole North-East, and it lies on the Northeast Frontier Railway. That zone's headquarters is at Maligaon in Guwahati.

Indian Railways is administered as a set of zones, each headed by a General Manager and subdivided into divisions under Divisional Railway Managers. The distinction between a zonal headquarters and a divisional one is exactly what this item tests, and it is where most candidates come unstuck, because many large and famous railway towns are divisional headquarters only. Two names in particular are worth separating: the North Eastern Railway is headquartered at Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, while the Northeast Frontier Railway is headquartered at Maligaon in Guwahati — similar names, different zones, different states.

At the time of this April 2018 paper Indian Railways ran seventeen zones, with the Kolkata Metro Railway usually counted alongside them as an eighteenth. The map has moved since. A new South Coast Railway zone with its headquarters at Visakhapatnam was announced and has now been set up, taking the count to nineteen operational zones including Metro Railway Kolkata, and it was scheduled to begin operating from Visakhapatnam on 1 June 2026. None of that disturbs the answer to this item — Hajipur has been the East Central Railway's headquarters throughout — but a candidate quoting the number of zones should date the figure. The efficient way to prepare is to learn the zones as headquarters-and-state triples rather than as a list of names, and to note the two cities that host more than one zonal headquarters: Kolkata has both the Eastern Railway and the South Eastern Railway, the latter at Garden Reach.

• Hajipur, in Bihar, is the headquarters of the East Central Railway, a zone created in 1996.
• The North Eastern Railway is headquartered at Gorakhpur; the Northeast Frontier Railway at Maligaon, Guwahati.
• Lucknow hosts divisions of both the Northern Railway and the North Eastern Railway, but no zonal headquarters.
• New Jalpaiguri lies on the Northeast Frontier Railway, whose zonal headquarters is at Maligaon.
• Indian Railways had seventeen zones plus the Kolkata Metro at the time of this exam; there are nineteen operational zones now, the newest being South Coast Railway at Visakhapatnam.

• Assuming a famous or busy junction must be a zonal headquarters; most large junctions are divisional ones.
• Confusing the North Eastern Railway with the Northeast Frontier Railway, and Gorakhpur with Maligaon.
• Quoting the number of zones without dating it, since the count has changed since this paper was set.

NDA has set railway headquarters as a single-city question like this one, as a zone-to-headquarters match list, and as a 'which pair is not correctly matched' item.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The headquarters of the North Eastern Railway zone is at

  • (a)Guwahati
  • (b)Gorakhpur
  • (c)Lucknow
  • (d)Hajipur

  Answer(b) Gorakhpur — Guwahati (Maligaon) is the headquarters of the separate Northeast Frontier Railway.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following cities hosts the headquarters of two railway zones?

  • (a)Mumbai
  • (b)Kolkata
  • (c)Chennai
  • (d)Jaipur

  Answer(b) Kolkata — the Eastern Railway and the South Eastern Railway, the latter at Garden Reach.