Surekha Yadav
Surekha Shankar Yadav née
Surekha Ramchandra Bhosale (born 2 September 1965) is the senior-most female locopilot (train driver) of the
Indian Railways in
India,. She became India's as well as first Asian female train driver in 1988. She drove the first "Ladies Special" local train for
Central Railways when it was first introduced in the four metro cities by
Mamata Banerjee the then Railway Minister, in April 2000. She was suburban local train motor woman from 2000 to 2010. She then got promoted to Sr. Loco Pilot Mail in 2010. A momentous event in her career was on 8 March 2011, on the
International Women's Day, when she became
Asia's first woman train driver to drive the
Deccan Queen from
Pune to
CST, through difficult but scenic topography, where she was greeted by the then
Mayor of Mumbai Shraddha Jadhav, at CST, the headquarter of
Central Railway zone. She repeated the feat ten years later driving an all-woman crew from Mumbai to Lucknow. A commonly heard comment in 2011 was that "Women don't drive railway engines'".
Provided by Wikipedia
