India again -- in this novel, not "as was", but "as might have been". The Peshawar Lancers by S.M. Stirling, specialist in alternative-ish history, and global cataclysms. In the "universe" of this book, a combination of natural, largely meteorological, catastrophes in 1878 -- "comets and stuff" -- has rapidly and drastically altered the climate. The more northerly parts of the Northern Hemisphere quickly became too cold for human habitation: those nations which could, relocated as much as is possible, to their empires in warmer climes further south. The centre of such British activity, came to be British India; where the novel is essentially set. A different place in many respects, from how it has been in "our time-line" -- one aspect, is the achieving of a higher degree of equality and good relations in India, between "white" and "brown" folk.
The author has the effects of the catastrophes, greatly slowing down technological progress. Although the novel's action is set in the year 2025: such air travel as happens, is by airship -- aeroplanes as we know them, have not so far been practical. Road motor transport exists, but is far from widespread; most mechanical land transport is on rail, and handled by steam locomotives. (I don't think Stirling is a railfan as such; he just found this situation appropriate for the "universe" which he was creating.) The chief rail-centered episode occurs early in the book: a couple of the principal characters are travelling by rail from Peshawar to Rawalpindi and ultimately way on into Kashmir (some lines exist in this milieu, which never have done in our time-line). Selective quoting from this part of the book: "... the Indian Railways' [a little earlier, there has been mention of an entity called the Imperial Indian Railways] broad standard gauge of five-foot-six made for comfortable rolling stock." One might extrapolate (no mention in the book, of such minutiae), that in this "universe", India's metre-gauge system never came to be: that system was, in our time-line, only in its infancy as at the late 1870s.
The book continues: "The local to Rawalpindi [and points east] was no Trans-India Express: it chuffed along at a stately forty miles an hour, trailing black coal smoke. It was pulled by a Babur-class 4-6-2 built to a design standardised in the days when Edward was King-Emperor, Lord Salisbury was prime minister, and the twentieth century was young. Thousands of them worked everywhere from Australia to the Cape and even beyond ..." There's no mention of what the gauge situation might have been in Australia and South Africa, as opposed to India; as observed, the author is basically not a rail nerd ! "This train also stopped at every small town along the way, those growing more frequent as they moved out of the Northwest Frontier Province and into the richer, more densely settled Punjab."
Further rail-and-steam material much later in the narrative -- our intrepid heroes hitch a ride, in perilous and exciting circumstances, on a freight train heading for Bombay. "[the main hero] calculated angles. The freight wasn't a fast train; still toy-tiny at this distance, but it looked like a Danavas-class 4-8-2, a standard heavy hauler. That meant forty miles an hour or so, on a straightaway and flat ground." A couple of paragraphs later: "It was a freight all right, mostly flatcars loaded with huge Himalayan cypress logs a yard through and thirty feet long ... Other flatcars carried cotton in five-hundred-pound bales, stacked square and too high to climb, and a few boxcars toward the rear might have anything; most probably grain in sacks." (Mr. Stirling is from, and resident in, North America; hence the American rail terms.)
This is a novel which I would whole-heartedly recommend: altogether excellently written, set in a fascinatingly strange and exotic milieu, crafted and described with meticulous care -- splendid character-portrayal, and plentiful and suspenseful derring-do (and a fair leavening of wry humour). I would reckon the situation of virtually universal everyday steam working, continents-wide, in the early 21st century -- as just the icing on the cake !