Few schools in India can say they are older than the railway zone that runs them. Ours can.
When the first train steamed into Gorakhpur in January 1885, the Bengal & North-Western Railway made the town its headquarters — and around the new offices, yards and workshops grew the railway colonies: Jatepur, Bauliya, Bichhia, and Kauwabagh. The railway brought engineers, drivers, guards, clerks and craftsmen from across India, and their children needed a school.
In 1907, in the heart of the colony, a Mixed Primary School opened its doors. It would outlive the B&NWR itself, pass to the Oudh & Tirhut Railway in 1943, and in 1952 become part of the newly created North Eastern Railway — whose headquarters stand barely a kilometre and a half from the school gate.
Through the 1950s, 60s and 70s it grew into the North Eastern Railway Higher Secondary School (English Medium) — generations remember the lovely brick building set among tree-lined colony roads, within walking distance of the railway yard. In 1985 it took its present name, N. E. Railway Senior Secondary School, with CBSE affiliation from Class I to XII.
National policy from 1988 onwards expected railway schools to fade away. Ours did not. It crossed its centenary in 2007, weathered the closure orders of 2021 (withdrawn in July 2022), and continues today as the affordable English-medium CBSE school of the railway colony — exam centre, neighbourhood landmark, and keeper of more than a century of memories.
This association exists so that those memories — and the people who made them — are never scattered again.