12DN Hazara Express Departs Behind the HGMU 30-R: The Flip Side of a Midnight Dual Action
The Flip Side of a Midnight Dual Action
If you read yesterday’s article, you saw the approach: 45UP Pakistan Express rolling toward Multan Cantt behind GEU-40 No. 9001 while 12DN Hazara Express crossed it in a roaring midnight dual action. What you did not see — until now — is what happened three minutes later. Our camera stayed on. The Hazara Express, hauled by an HGMU 30-R, pulled out of the station and straight into the path of the oncoming Pakistan Express. Same two trains. Same dark. Roles completely reversed. This is the departure half of the story.
🎥 Watch the Midnight Dual Action
The departure, the crossing, and the flip side — the night's dual action, captured on video.
Watch on YouTube: Smart Earth — Midnight Dual Action
1 The Other Side of the Eclipse
A dual action is the railway’s version of a solar eclipse — we said that yesterday, and it is worth saying again, because most people only ever see one side of it. You film the approach: the headlight growing on the horizon, the horn rolling across the yards, the long rake of coaches streaming behind the locomotive. You catch the crossing: two trains level for a heartbeat, wind and noise doubling, and then one of them is gone. The camera usually stops there. Ours didn’t.
At nearly one in the morning, the station exhaled after the Pakistan Express rolled in — and then a second horn answered from the other end of the platform. The signal flickered green. And the 12DN Hazara Express began to move. If the first video was about arrival, this one is about everything that happens the moment a train decides to leave: the slack running out of the couplings, the engine note deepening as the driver notches up, the platform lamps sliding past the windows faster and faster until the whole rake is a ribbon of light disappearing into the dark.
And just as the Hazara Express found its rhythm, the headlights of the 45UP Pakistan Express appeared on the adjacent track — coming the other way, fast. The dual action wasn’t over. It was happening again, in mirror image.
The train pulling out. 12DN is the southbound working of the Hazara Express, one of the long-distance expresses that tie the north of the country to Karachi. On this run it was hauled by an HGMU 30-R, and it left the platform the way a good express should: deliberately, then all at once.
The train coming through. 45UP is the northbound working of the Pakistan Express, running between Karachi and Rawalpindi. Minutes after its own arrival drama, it was back on the move — and back in our frame, this time as the train roaring past.
2 The HGMU 30-R: The Railway’s Quiet Workhorse
Every railfan has a favourite locomotive class, and the HGMU 30-R rarely wins the popularity contest — which is exactly why it deserves this paragraph. These GE-derived diesel-electrics, in the 3,000-horsepower bracket, are the unglamorous middleweight champions of Pakistan Railways: not the biggest, not the newest, but the ones that show up, night after night, and drag long express rakes across the main line without complaint.
Watch one working at night and you understand the appeal. The turbo whine is higher and busier than the big GEU-40s’ deep growl. The headlight sits a little lower and throws a slightly wider cone, which means the beam picks up the mist, the ballast stones, the fence posts whipping past — the whole texture of the railway at 1 AM. In our footage, the 30-R does something cameras love: it works. You can hear the engine labouring as the rake’s weight comes on, see the exhaust shimmer in the headlight, and then — released — it settles into that long, confident night-running stride.
Locomotive spotters, take note: the HGMU 30-R fleet is the kind of class that quietly becomes a legend. Nobody writes songs about reliable. But reliability is what keeps the timetable breathing.
3 12DN Hazara Express: The Southbound Night Runner
The Hazara Express is one of those trains whose name carries a whole geography with it — a long-distance service linking the northern reaches of the country with Karachi, running the length of the main line through cities most travellers only ever see from a coach window. The 12DN working is the southbound run, and like all the great night expresses, it does its hardest work while the country sleeps.
There is something particular about a night departure on a long-distance train. The platform goodbye has a different charge to it after midnight: fewer people, quieter voices, the station announcements echoing off an almost-empty concourse. Passengers settle into berths they will wake up in, hundreds of kilometres away. The tea vendors make their last rounds. And then the whistle — that long, two-tone night whistle that every Pakistani rail traveller knows in their bones — and the train is moving, and the platform is already a memory.
Our video catches that exact sequence. Watch for the moment the coaches’ windows begin to slide past the platform lamps: that is the point of no return, the few seconds where a stationary train becomes a moving one, and the whole journey compresses into a single, gathering acceleration.
4 The Crossing, Frame by Frame
Then comes the part this video exists for. The Hazara Express is barely up to speed when the second headlight appears — the Pakistan Express, on the adjacent track, coming the other way at full express pace. What follows lasts maybe ten seconds, and it is the densest ten seconds of railway footage you will see this week.
Frame one: two headlights, two tracks, converging. Frame two: the horns — you will hear the 30-R’s horn first, then the deeper answer from the Pakistan Express’s locomotive, overlapping into a chord that no composer would dare write. Frame three: the locomotives draw level, and for an instant the two cabs are side by side, two crews doing the most ordinary thing in their working night while the camera treats it like the most extraordinary. Frame four onward: coaches, coaches, coaches — two rakes flashing past each other in opposite directions, windows strobing, the slipstream between them becoming a visible wall of disturbed air and dust.
And then it is over. The Pakistan Express is gone north. The Hazara Express is alone on its road south, its tail lamp winking red into the dark. The platform is quiet again — quieter than before, somehow, the way a room feels after loud music stops. Ten seconds of thunder, then the night takes it all back.
Ask a platform regular and they will tell you: arrivals are for the people waiting, but departures are for the dreamers. An arrival is a reunion; a departure is a promise. When a train pulls out at night, everyone on the platform — the waving families, the porters, the stray dogs, the railfan with the camera — is watching the same thing: a machine choosing the horizon over the station. The headlight doesn’t shrink so much as decide to leave. That is why departure footage, filmed well, always feels more cinematic than arrival footage. The train is going somewhere. So, for a moment, are you.
5 Filming the Night Railway: What This Shot Teaches
This video is a small masterclass in night railway filming, and it is worth breaking down why it works — whether you film with a phone or a cinema camera:
- Stay after the main event. The best footage of the night came three minutes after the “main” crossing. Timetables and luck give you the first shot; patience gives you the second.
- Let the dark do the work. At night, the camera doesn’t need to see everything — it needs to see the right things: headlight cones, signal greens, window light. Expose for the lights, not the shadows.
- Sound is half the film. The doppler drop of a passing horn, the layered engine notes, the coupling slack running out — night audio is clean because the world is quiet. Record it properly.
- Hold the wide shot. When the second headlight appears, the temptation is to zoom. Don’t. The drama of a dual action is in the geometry — two lines of light converging — and only the wide shot shows it.
- Respect the platform. Stand back from the edge, never cross the yellow line for a shot, and remember the crews are working while you are filming. The railway gives us these moments; the least we can do is stay safe and stay out of the way.
📍 Railfan tip: the stretch around Multan Cantt after midnight is one of the busiest windows on the main line — expresses in both directions, freights threading between them. If you want a dual action of your own, a quiet platform at 1 AM with a thermos of chai is the best seat in the house.
6 Ride It Yourself: The Night Express Experience
Watching is one thing; riding is another — and both of these trains are still out there, running their nightly marathons. If our footage has put the idea in your head, here is the honest version of what a night on a Pakistani express feels like: the berth that is somehow more comfortable than your bed at home, the rhythm of the rails doing what no white-noise app ever could, the 3 AM chai at a station you will never remember the name of, and waking up to a sunrise over countryside you fell asleep nowhere near.
Book a sleeper if you can — the real night-train experience needs a horizontal traveller. Pack light, carry your own water, keep your camera charged and your power bank charged-er, and choose a window seat on the side away from the platform at major stations (you will thank us). And when the horn sounds at some unlit crossing in the small hours, don’t sleep through it. Sit up. Look out. That is the railway talking, and it is saying exactly what our video says: we are moving, and the night is ours.
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