Punjab's rail network is dense and old, built by the North Western Railway before 1947, and much of it is now under-used for passengers because buses are faster on short routes.
Its main function is freight: grain out, coal and fertiliser in. The seasonal grain movement out of Punjab is one of the larger regular freight flows in the Indian system.
Rail blockades are a standard form of protest in Punjab and have been used by farm unions, by employee groups and by political parties, and a blockade of the Punjab lines interrupts the national grain and coal movement within days, which is why it is effective.
The Kapurthala Rail Coach Factory builds a large share of Indian Railways' passenger coaches.
The Amritsar to Lahore line, the first railway built in Punjab in 1862, carries nothing across the border.
The Kalka to Shimla narrow gauge line, a World Heritage Site, starts in the plain at the edge of Punjab's old territory and goes up into what used to be its hill districts.
The network is dense and the services are slow. Punjab's trains are mostly passenger and mail services on lines built for a different traffic pattern.
The freight is grain, moving out to the rest of India from the mandis, and the rakes are loaded at points that have not changed in fifty years.
Several branch lines have been closed or left unserved since the 1990s and the stations on them stand empty. A line that stops carrying passengers in Punjab is rarely reopened, because the bus takes the traffic inside a year.