Up and down: how Pakistan Railways numbers its trains

If you have looked at a Pakistani train timetable you have seen the suffixes. Khyber Mail 1UP. Tezgam 8DN. Karachi Express 15UP. Most people read past them, and most people who do notice them assume they mean something vaguely geographic, which is half right in a way worth being precise about.

We hold a roster of 105 passenger services. That is enough to check the folklore against the data rather than repeat it, so this article does that, and reports the exceptions as well as the rule, because a rule with its exceptions hidden is just a rumour with a number attached.

The rule

Every service carries a number and a direction flag. Across our 105 services:

• All 51 UP services carry an odd number. Not most of them. All of them.
• 53 of the 54 DN services carry an even number. One does not, and it is worth its own section further down.

So in practice, if you know a Pakistani train's number you already know its direction: odd is up, even is down. Khyber Mail runs as 1UP going one way and 2DN coming back. Tezgam is 7UP and 8DN. Karachi Express is 15UP and 16DN.

That pairing is not a habit, it is the structure. Every one of the 52 odd numbers in our roster has a partner at the next number up, with no gaps and no exceptions: 1 has a 2, 39 has a 40, 227 has a

1. And 51 of those 52 pairs share a name as well as a number, so the pair really is one named

service running in both directions rather than two unrelated workings that happen to sit next to each other in the numbering.

What up and down actually mean

Here is where the geographic intuition needs correcting. Up does not mean north, and it does not mean uphill. It is inherited from British railway practice, where up meant towards the more important terminus, and on this network the reference point is Karachi.

The data says it plainly. Sorting our services by where they start and where they finish, the picture is symmetric:

• The commonest UP origins are Karachi Cantt (14 services) and Karachi City (8).
• The commonest DN destinations are Karachi Cantt (14 services) and Karachi City (8).
• The commonest UP destinations are Lahore Jn (9), Rawalpindi (8) and Peshawar Cantt (5).
• The commonest DN origins are Lahore Jn (9), Rawalpindi (7) and Peshawar Cantt (5).

That is the same list read in a mirror, which is what you would expect if up and down are one journey described from two ends. Up runs away from Karachi, towards Lahore, Rawalpindi and Peshawar. Down runs back towards Karachi.

But only 22 of the 51 UP services actually begin at a Karachi station. The rest start somewhere further along: Jaffar Express runs as 39UP from Jacobabad Junction to Peshawar Cantt, and Subak Raftar runs as 101UP entirely between Lahore and Rawalpindi, nowhere near the coast. So up is not "starts at Karachi". It is "runs in the direction that leads to Karachi if you reverse it", which holds for every service on the roster including the ones that never go near it.

Why this is useful rather than trivia

Three practical consequences.

A number tells you a direction, so it disambiguates a name. Tezgam is two trains. If you search for delay history on "Tezgam" without a number, you are asking about a service that runs Karachi to Rawalpindi and a different service that runs Rawalpindi to Karachi, and their punctuality is not the same. Every train page on this site carries the number for exactly this reason.

Booking systems and station boards use the number, not the name. A shuttle can share a name with three other shuttles on different branches. The number is unique.

It is a fast sanity check on anything you read. If a site tells you about "Awam Express 14UP", something is wrong with that page, because 14 is even. It is a small check and it catches a surprising amount of carelessly copied content.

The train that breaks the rule

One service in the roster does not fit, and it is more interesting than an error usually is.

Dera Ghazi Khan Shuttle is a pair like any other: 227 running Dera Ghazi Khan to Multan Cantt, and 228 running Multan Cantt to Dera Ghazi Khan. The numbers are right, the routes mirror each other properly, and the name of the first one ends in UP.

But the direction flag on 227 says down. Both halves of the pair are flagged as down services, which cannot be true of two trains running opposite ways along the same branch. Three separate signals agree the flag is wrong: the odd number, the name's own UP suffix, and the fact that its route is the exact reverse of its even-numbered partner.

We have not corrected it. The flag is what the operator's own roster says, and this site's rule is that we archive what we were given and describe it accurately rather than quietly improving it. What we can do is tell you it is there, which is what this section is. If you are looking at Dera Ghazi Khan Shuttle on this site and the direction looks wrong to you, you are right and it is not your mistake.

There is also one even number with no odd partner, 274, running as a shuttle between Malakwal Junction and Pind Dadan Khan. Whether its missing partner was withdrawn, renumbered, or never existed we cannot tell from the roster alone, so we say only that it is missing.

How to read a number when you see one

Putting it together, when you see a service like Shalimar Express 27UP:

• Shalimar Express is the named service, running both ways.
• 27 is this direction's number. Odd, so it is the up working, and its partner is 28.
• UP confirms it, and on this network up means the direction leading away from Karachi.

And on this site, that whole string is what a train page is about. The punctuality figures on 27UP describe the run from Karachi Cantt to Lahore Jn, and 28DN has its own page with its own figures, because they are two different journeys that happen to share a name.

Every figure in this article comes from the passenger roster this archive holds, counted at the time of writing. Where you can see this data yourself, and what we do and do not measure, is set out in where our train delay data comes from. If you want to read the timetable those numbers sit in, start with how to read a Pakistan Railways timetable.