A night train runs Bathinda to Bikaner, about 325 kilometres, leaving around half past nine and arriving around six. It carries roughly 300 passengers, of whom about a third are cancer patients travelling to the Acharya Tulsi Regional Cancer Hospital and Research Centre at Bikaner, where treatment is subsidised.
It is universally called the cancer train.
The causal link between pesticide use in the Malwa and elevated cancer incidence is contested, not settled. Much of the reporting presents it as established and cites no counter-evidence and no named researchers. Some cancer registry analyses put Punjab's incidence at or near the national average.
The train is real. The people on it are real. What is disputed is the epidemiology, and a project claiming to carry what the people of Punjab know has to say all three of those things in the same breath or it is not worth trusting on anything else.
The passengers are travelling to a cancer centre at Bikaner that treats free or at very low cost, and the name came from journalism in the 2000s rather than from the railway.
The name is contested by the state and by some researchers, on the ground that the train carries people from Rajasthan and Haryana too and that no controlled study has established a Punjab-specific excess.
What is not contested is that a large number of people from the south west of the state travel three hundred kilometres overnight for treatment because it is cheaper there than at home.