Desi Tamasha

Pratima and Jay had come over for dinner last night. Jay told us about a train he took from Netherlands to Denmark sometime in the 80s. When the train came to the sea, it was broken up into three parts and each was carried by a different ferry across the water where it was reassembled into a train. While on the ferry, you could get down from your train coach and get snacks. I thought the concept was super-amusing and a bit outlandish. Turns out this sort of stuff was (is?) fairly common in the 19th and 20th century wherever a bridge was considered "too stupendous an undertaking to be seriously thought of..."

Pratima also mentioned the Bombay dabbawalas and their tiffin routing. The algorithm is explained at several places on the Internet and here is what the notation looks like (via Rediff):

Link