General Manager (Retd.), Western Railway. A 37-year journey across eleven cities in the service of Indian Railways, from the steam locomotive workshops of Dahod to the leadership of a workforce of 95,000.
Selected through the prestigious Special Class Railway Apprentice (SCRA) examination in 1986, Ashok Kumar Misra joined the Indian Railway Service of Mechanical Engineers and gave the next thirty-seven years to the railways that move India. His career began in 1990 amid the steam locomotives of Dahod Workshop, and ended, in a turn of poetic symmetry, overseeing the creation of a ₹20,000-crore electric locomotive factory in that very town.
Across eleven cities and five railway zones, he served as Divisional Railway Manager of Jhansi, Principal Chief Mechanical Engineer of East Central Railway, Additional General Manager of North Eastern Railway, and ultimately General Manager of Western Railway, leading more than 1,100 officers and a workforce of nearly 95,000 across six divisions, from the headquarters at Churchgate, Mumbai.
An engineer by training and an administrator by temperament, he retired on 30 June 2025, marking the occasion not with ceremony, but with a 20-kilometre farewell bicycle ride.
Associate Member, Institution of Engineers (India) · Mechanical & Metallurgy divisions
Photographs from years of service on the Indian Railways.