One day trip to Matheran

Matheran is a beautiful hill station that is between Pune and Mumbai. It has several amazing view points and the best part is that it can be reached in a train, toy train to be precise (this is a blessing for folks like me who have motion sickness)

Also note that all the details mentioned here are as of November 2014 so please do more research if your travel date is long after that.

Now coming back to the toy train, you will need to get to a station called Neral which is the starting point of our toy train. There doesn't seem to be a way to book the tickets online so you have to get to the station to book them. But don't worry there are plenty of seats and you can easily get your tickets on the spot.

How to reach Narel:
1. From Mumbai: The local trains on the central line stop at Neral (towards Karjat). This is about 1.5 hours away from CSTM.

2. From Pune: You will need to board a train that stops at Karjat. Get down there and board any local train that goes towards Mumbai.



Train Time table for the toy train

Before booking the tickets, I suggest walking into the train to take a look at the seats you want to occupy and then go and ask for those seats while booking the tickets. Even in second class some seats have better leg space than the rest.



The toy train behind me



I also would recommend to get the seats on different sides of the train when going up and coming down. So make sure you ask for the side you want before purchasing the ticket. 

 

Train while going up

It takes a while to reach Matheran. There are several view points in Matheran and covering them all would need more than 1 day. So try covering the good ones first and then if time permits you can check out the others.

Viewpoints - the nicer ones are in bold

Hope you have a great trip. Check out some of the amazing views below.