10 Indian Cricketers Who Have Deep Ties to Indian Railways

Ask any Indian cricket fan where they were when Dhoni’s six went in 2011. They’ll tell you exactly the place, who was in the room, what they were eating. These things stick in our memories, that’s almost embarrassing. However, what nobody mentions is the constant, subtle, and backseat role Indian Railways played in shaping these iconic Indian cricketers.

Spend some time tracing back where India’s top Indian cricketers actually came from and Indian Railways keeps appearing, not in a romantic, scripted way, just showing up again and again. Railways  was the thing that kept a career going when it easily could have stopped. A TTE job in Kharagpur. A Ranji team that said yes when state boards said no. A sleeper berth from Bombay to Calcutta where two players who’d barely spoken became the kind of teammates who don’t need to. Most cricket history skips right past this. Here’s an attempt to not do that.

How Indian Cricketers and Railways Are Connected

Railway colonies are a world of their own. Housing blocks, schools, small hospitals, open maidans where cricket happened every Sunday because that was what you did. A boy growing up in a colony at Kharagpur or Nagpur didn’t get enrolled in an academy. He simply played outside with his friends.

A posting as a Travelling Ticket Examiner or station clerk was steady work. It provided salary, housing, and hours flexible enough to still play Ranji cricket. For a 22-year-old in a gap between opportunities, that was enormous. It wasn’t giving up on cricket. It was what paid for staying in it.

The Railways Ranji Trophy team, which Lala Amarnath founded in 1959-60, became the side for cricketers already told no elsewhere. Delhi didn’t want them. Maharashtra had moved on. Railways took them, gave them first-class cricket, and put them in front of national selectors. Several ended up on the Indian side.

Top Indian Cricketers and Their Railways Connection

These are our picks for the top Indian Crickets whose lives have been influenced or shaped by the Railways. Each player has a different story, equally interesting and equally inspiring.

1. MS Dhoni: He Was Checking Tickets at Kharagpur Station

South Eastern Railway, Kharagpur station, 2001 to 2003. That’s where Dhoni’s story as an Indian cricketer actually starts, not at the glamorous Chepauk, not at the BCCI, not at a big shot IPL auction. Before all of this, he was a Travelling Ticket Examiner in a Khaki uniform, government salary and railway quarters. Cricket somehow fits around the job.

A local selector noticed him playing at Kharagpur. By 2004 he was in India’s one-day squad and by 2007 he was lifting the T20 World Cup. The thing people describe as Dhoni’s calmness was the complete absence of visible panic in high-pressure situations, probably having something to do with spending two years showing up to a government posting when nobody had any particular reason to think the cricket was going anywhere. That sort of experience tends to put things in proportion.

2. Sanjay Bangar: Four Trophies. Over a Decade. All for Railways.

Two Ranji titles, One Vijay Hazare, One Irani Trophy. Sanjay Bangar won four major domestic trophies as captain of the Railways team, and he did it over a career spanning more than ten years and 165 first-class matches: 8,349 runs, 300 wickets. That’s the Railways connection. It’s not a footnote in his story, it is his story.

He got his India call in 2001 and scored 68 at Headingley in a match India won in England. He later became the national batting coach. What’s easy to miss about Bangar is that those Railways teams weren’t built on one exceptional player carrying the rest. They were genuinely functional sides, which is harder to build and a more reliable type of success. That says something about him as a captain that the trophy count alone doesn’t quite capture.

Sanjay Bangar has a daughter named Ananya (formerly Aryan) Bangar. She is a cricketer and a transgender woman who went through her gender reassignment surgery. She is a vocal activist for the LGBTQ community.

3. Murali Kartik: Delhi Said No. Railways Said Yes.

Murali Kartik didn’t make it to the Delhi’s under-19 team. That’s where his story would have ended for a lot of people. Instead he went to Railways, debuted in the 1996-97 Ranji season, and took 24 wickets in his first year. Over the next decade and 203 first-class matches, he averaged roughly five wickets per game. That level of consistency over that volume of cricket takes genuine sustained quality.

India gave him 8 Tests and 37 ODIs, not easy to come by when both Kumble and Harbhajan were bowling for the same team. His best figures in an India shirt: six for 27 against Australia in Mumbai, 2007, a spell that won India the match. He commentates now and does it better than most. The Delhi under-19 rejection is the first scene of a story with a very good ending and Railways is what made the rest of it possible.

4. Yashpal Sharma: He Was in the 1983 Photo. Railways Helped Put Him There.

Lord’s, June 25, 1983. Kapil Dev with the Prudential Cup. India had beaten the West Indies in the final, which almost nobody had predicted and which changed Indian cricket permanently. Yashpal Sharma is in that photograph. Not only did he participate in the world cup but was the second highest scorer with the bat, behind only the captain Kapil Dev. 

He played Ranji cricket for Railways during a significant stretch of his career, one of the players who used the Railways competitive structure to develop alongside his Punjab commitments. 37 Tests for India with 1,606 runs and two centuries. His value to the side was rarely in a single spectacular innings but in the consistent ones at 90 for 4 when someone needed to stop the slide. That job, done quietly over and over across a Test career, matters more than it looks.

Yashpal Sharma died in 2021. He doesn’t come up much in cricket conversations these days, which isn’t right. The 1983 squad, the Railways system that helped shape him, and the kind of batting that holds teams together in difficult passages, all of it deserves more attention than it gets.

Just as the Railways provided a reliable path for these legends, RailMitra provides a reliable path for your journey. Whether you’re traveling to watch a match or heading home, check your live PNR status and seat availability in one place.

5. Ashutosh Sharma: Dropped, Depressed, Rescued by Railways

In 2019, Ashutosh Sharma scored 84 runs in his last game for Madhya Pradesh. That same season, a new coach came in and didn’t select him, no explanation given, no conversation about what he needed to improve. He went into depression. He has talked about this publicly: not sleeping, lying awake trying to understand why he’d been dropped after performing, watching MP go on to win the Ranji Trophy with a squad he wasn’t part of.

Railways gave him a job and a team. An actual employment offer and a Ranji Trophy spot when his previous state had shut the door without bothering to say why. In October 2023, playing for Railways in the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy against Arunachal Pradesh, he reached fifty off 11 balls, the fastest half-century by an Indian batter in T20 cricket, breaking the record that the legendary Yuvraj Singh had held for sixteen years. He also scored 200 off 60 balls in an inter-railway match that put him in front of every IPL scout paying attention.

Punjab Kings bought him at his base price of 20 lakh in the IPL 2024 auction. He repaid it with innings that Punjab fans are still talking about, walking in at crisis situations, finishing games, striking at close to 200. Delhi Capitals paid 3.80 crore for him in 2025. He is currently the vice-captain of the Railways Ranji Trophy squad. The distance between a sleepless night in Madhya Pradesh and an IPL auction stage is enormous. Railways is what connected those two points.

6. Syed Kirmani: Who Was India’s Best Keeper Before Dhoni?

Most people who know their cricket history will say Syed Kirmani without much hesitation. 88 Tests, 198 dismissals and the first-choice keeper for India through much of the 1970s and 80s. Technical, reliable, consistent across a long international career and a prominent part of the 1983 World Cup winning squad.

He played for Railways in the Ranji Trophy. That fact tends to get absorbed without much comment, but it’s worth pausing on, a player of sustained international quality choosing Railways as his domestic team. It wasn’t a lesser option or a sign of career decline. The Col CK Nayudu Lifetime Achievement Award came in 2016. Any serious ranking of Indian wicketkeepers has him at or near the top, directly above a single line: also played for Indian Railways.

In November 2023 another meet up between the Railways and Syed Kirmani took place. Here, Mr. Kirmani flagged off a Legends League Cricket tour on a Vande Bharat Express train with Jonty Rhodes in association with the Indian Railways.

7. Lala Amarnath: He Didn’t Just Play for Railways. He Built the Team.

In 1959, Lala Amarnath was 48 years old, had already captained India, and had scored the country’s first Test century twenty-six years earlier. He took on the captaincy of the newly formed Railways Ranji Trophy team. Nobody asked him to, yet he chose the Railways. He had long since earned the right to leave the hard work to younger men, but there was still a hunger in him.

He turned up and scouted players himself. Batted and bowled in practice alongside men half his age. Built a team around Budhi Kunderan and Vijay Mehra that competed seriously in the North Zone. The culture he established, of showing up properly, taking the job seriously and earning what you get, ran through the Railways setup for decades after he was gone. Every Indian cricketer who came through the Railways pipeline at any point over the following sixty years was, in some indirect way, playing in a structure that Lala Amarnath decided was worth building.

8. Budhi Kunderan: He Played Tests for India Before His First Ranji Match

That sentence is worth reading twice. Budhi Kunderan had already represented India in three Tests before he played his first Ranji Trophy match. He is one of only a handful of cricketers in history to have turned out for their country at Test level before making their domestic first-class debut. His Ranji debut came for Railways in 1959-60, under Lala Amarnath, and he scored 205 against Jammu-Kashmir on that first appearance.

Kunderan grew up in Bombay but with Naren Tamhane firmly ahead of him as the city’s first-choice keeper, there was no clear path through at Bombay. Railways gave him one. What followed was a career that included 525 Test runs in a single series against England in 1963-64, which was at the time, only the second wicketkeeper in history to pass 500 runs in a Test series. The keeper-batsman template that MS Dhoni later carried to its logical conclusion had an earlier version, and it wore Railways colours.

9. JP Yadav: ICC Champions Trophy Winner. Railways’ All-Round Engine.

Jai Prakash Yadav doesn’t get enough credit. The Bhopal-born all-rounder was part of the Indian squad that shared the 2002 ICC Champions Trophy and domestically he was one of the most complete performers Railways ever fielded. In the 2004-05 Ranji season, he topped the wicket-takers’ list for the entire competition while also contributing significantly with the bat, and Railways won the title that year with him as a central figure.

He played 12 ODIs for India between 2002 and 2005. His domestic career across 130 first-class matches produced over 7,300 runs and 296 wickets, the kind of combined output that makes a selector’s job easier. His Railways career was interrupted when he joined the unsanctioned Indian Cricket League in 2007, earned a BCCI ban, and was eventually granted amnesty in 2009. He came back to Railways after that as the connection ran deeper than mere convenience.

10. Karn Sharma: Four IPL Titles. Still Turns Out for Railways.

Karn Sharma made his first-class debut for Railways in 2007-08. In the 2022-23 Ranji Trophy season he captained the side. He turned out for them again in 2024-25. That’s seventeen years of coming back to the same team, which in the modern era of franchise cricket and state transfers is genuinely uncommon.

Meanwhile he also won four IPL titles, including three consecutive ones with three different franchises. These include: Sunrisers Hyderabad in 2016, Mumbai Indians in 2017, Chennai Super Kings in 2018. Indian National Team has also capped him across Test, ODI and T20I cricket. And through all of it, he keeps returning to Railways in the Ranji Trophy. In a cricket landscape where players drift between associations chasing contracts and profiles, that choice says something that is harder to explain with numbers.

Six Decades. One Connection Nobody Writes About.

These ten names aren’t a coincidence. They’re a pattern. And the pattern points at something real about how Indian cricket actually developed, which is a different story from the version told at award ceremonies.

The official account focuses on the BCCI, marquee tournaments, the IPL. Some of that is accurate. But the earlier story, how a foundation got built for any of that to stand on runs through railway colony maidans, government salary cheques, and a Ranji team in Lala Amarnath’s image that gave cricketers a real chance when larger organisations had already moved past them. None of it was glamorous and none of it was announced. That’s probably why it rarely gets mentioned.

Conclusion

If you follow Indian cricket closely and haven’t spent much time on this particular thread, it’s worth pulling on it. These ten Indian cricketers aren’t the whole story but they’re a solid cross-section, Dhoni with his TTE posting at Kharagpur, Lala Amarnath building a Ranji side in his late forties, Kirmani and Kunderan both representing Railways at the height of their careers, Kartik rebuilding after Delhi rejected him, Karn Sharma winning four IPL titles and still returning to Railways every Ranji season, JP Yadav topping the wickets chart in a title-winning Railways campaign. Indian Railways was behind Indian cricket for over six decades. It paid people when they needed financial security, gave them competitive cricket when that was what they needed, and put them on trains together for nights at a time. The record books don’t quite capture how much of that mattered.