Which of the following pairs is/are correctly matched ?
(Railway Zone) — (Headquarter)
1. Northern Railway — New Delhi
2. North Eastern Railway — Gorakhpur
3. South Eastern Railway — Cuttack
Select th

Question

Which of the following pairs is/are correctly matched ?
(Railway Zone) — (Headquarter)
1. Northern Railway — New Delhi
2. North Eastern Railway — Gorakhpur
3. South Eastern Railway — Cuttack
Select the correct answer from the code given below :
Code :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, Only 1 and 2. Pair 1 is right: the Northern Railway has its headquarters at Baroda House in New Delhi. Pair 2 is right as well, and it is the pair a Uttar Pradesh candidate is expected to know cold: the North Eastern Railway is headquartered at Gorakhpur in eastern Uttar Pradesh. Pair 3 is the mismatch. The South Eastern Railway is headquartered at Garden Reach in Kolkata, West Bengal — successor to the old Bengal Nagpur Railway — and not at Cuttack. Cuttack is planted because it is in Odisha and sounds like the right kind of answer for a zone with 'South Eastern' in its name; but the zone that actually looks after most of Odisha is the East Coast Railway, and its headquarters is Bhubaneswar, not Cuttack. Cuttack is not a zonal headquarters at all. With pairs 1 and 2 correct and pair 3 wrong, the answer is (a).

Why the other options are wrong — (b) This rejects the Northern Railway - New Delhi pair, which is correct, and accepts the South Eastern Railway - Cuttack pair, which is not. The South Eastern Railway's headquarters is at Garden Reach in Kolkata.  (c) The one pair this option accepts is the only wrong one, and it discards the two correct ones. Cuttack heads no railway zone; Odisha's zone is the East Coast Railway with headquarters at Bhubaneswar.  (d) Northern Railway - New Delhi is indeed correct, but so is North Eastern Railway - Gorakhpur. A candidate lands here by confusing the North Eastern Railway (Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh) with the Northeast Frontier Railway, whose headquarters is at Maligaon in Guwahati, Assam.

Concept: Indian Railways is administered territorially: the network is divided into zones, each under a General Manager, and each zone is further split into divisions under Divisional Railway Managers. Zone names are directional, which is exactly why headquarters questions are worth asking — the name of a zone is a poor guide to where it is run from or which States it covers. The South Eastern Railway, carved out of the Bengal Nagpur Railway, is run from Kolkata even though much of its territory lies south and west of Bengal; the North Eastern Railway is run from Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh and has nothing to do with the north-eastern States, which are served by the Northeast Frontier Railway from Maligaon, Guwahati.

State PCS 2025 Q79 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q79 — Geography PYQ with Answer