Inside Royal Greens & Rails, India’s First Luxury Golf Experience by Rail

Some of the finest golf in India is played where you would least expect it. Courses sit inside palace grounds, beside the ramparts of desert forts, on fairways where peacocks work the rough. These are courses the wider golfing world has barely registered, and reaching a handful of them on one trip has always meant as many hours in transit as on the greens, which seemed to us a waste of a good country.

So we built the answer ourselves, a golf experience curated aboard an India luxury train.

Royal Greens & Rails gathers four of the country’s most fabulous courses onto one route, aboard the prominent Deccan Odyssey from Mumbai to Gurgaon over nine nights, ten days in all, with the first departure on 23 January 2027. It is an experience we have shaped exclusively for our guests. Seven of those nights are spent aboard the train, the final two in Gurgaon, where a single morning of golf grows into a full day among some of the country’s best fairways.

A New Way of Playing Golf in India

Playing golf in India has always rewarded the traveller willing to look past the obvious. The courses carry histories that few others in the world can claim, kept for generations beside the palaces of the very families who built them for their own joy. What has been missing is a way to reach the best of them without the travelling between wearing you down. Distances here run long, the roads are tiring, a self-planned circuit tends to sacrifice a day to transit for every day of play.

“Golfers know where to play in Scotland, in Portugal, in Dubai. Very few know India has courses older than most of those, kept inside palace grounds since the days of the maharajas.”

The train answers that at a stroke. Seven nights aboard the Deccan Odyssey take care of movement, meals and rest, so every golfing morning starts fresh. We set out to make a golf tour India had not seen before, one that holds the game inside a wider journey through Gujarat into Rajasthan, with room for far more than the golf itself. Only four mornings out of the ten go to the fairways, which leaves the palaces, the wildlife and the food of the country their rightful place.

“These are not resort courses built for visitors. They were laid out for royal families, for the officers stationed here, long before golf tourism existed.”

We begin in Vadodara at the Gaekwad Baroda Golf Club, Gujarat’s oldest private course. It sits within the grounds of the 125-year-old Laxmi Vilas Palace, its Par 69 fairways bending past old neem and tamarind trees, the clubhouse set in what was once a palace guesthouse. Beginning a golfing trip on the grounds of a palace like this is rare; it lifts the expectation for everything that follows.

Jodhpur comes next, where the Jodhpur Golf Club is housed within the Sardar Club in Ratanada, opposite the Chami Polo Ground. Built in 1901 in an Indo-colonial style, it was once the preserve of Marwar’s aristocracy alongside visiting British officers, its parkland course still holding that old-world air. It remains a private members’ club with a restricted guest policy, so we arrange this tee time well ahead of travel, part of what makes the round feel like a privilege earned.

In Jaipur we play the Rambagh Golf Club, founded in 1927 beside the Rambagh Palace, reworked in 2009 under Jeev Milkha Singh. The ramparts of the Moti Doongri and Nahargarh forts stand over its Par 70 fairways, so the history of the Pink City is never out of view. This is a golf course India can hold up alongside any heritage course abroad, where the setting counts for as much as the scorecard.

“Two of these clubs a visitor cannot simply walk into. That is precisely why we spend months arranging the tee times before a single guest boards.”

The journey keeps its best for last. In Gurgaon, a full day belongs to the DLF Golf & Country Club, widely rated among the country’s great golfing addresses. Twenty-seven holes run over two courses, the Gary Player Course of 2015, routed dramatically around lakes and a former quarry, then the original nine-hole Arnold Palmer Course of 1999, still the only floodlit night-golf layout in the land. A morning round, a clubhouse lunch and a twilight nine under the lights for anyone with the appetite fill out the day.

Exploring India, Luxury Train Style

The train is what turns four decent rounds into something far rarer. Most golf tours in India lose their days to transfers, terminals and the tedium of getting from place to place.[5] With us, those hours stay yours. The cabins aboard the Deccan Odyssey are en suite and tended by a valet, meals served on board throughout, the country moving past the window while you rest between games. There is a real contrast between teeing off after a served breakfast on board and teeing off after hours on the road; it shows in how you play.

The format carries a second grace. It looks after the companion who does not play. With only four golfing mornings on the schedule, the rest belongs to everything that draws people to India in the first place, so a non-golfer misses nothing by coming along. Udaipur means the City Palace and a boat gliding over Lake Pichola. Jodhpur puts Mehrangarh Fort in front of you at golden hour, high above the Blue City. Jaipur holds Amer Fort, the mirrored halls of the Sheesh Mahal, then the gemstones of the old bazaars once the touring is done. Agra, needless to say, has the Taj Mahal.

Wildlife earns its morning too. At Sawai Madhopur we turn to Ranthambore National Park, one of India’s premier tiger reserves, where an afternoon safari carries the chance, never promised, of a Royal Bengal Tiger crossing the track ahead.

“Nobody on this journey sits waiting at a hotel. The mornings belong to golf, the afternoons to the Taj Mahal, to Amer Fort, to a tiger reserve.”

The Last Days, in Delhi and Gurgaon

The rail leg ends in Delhi. Our final morning goes to the old city, to the lanes of Chandni Chowk, the clamour of the spice market and the great bulk of Jama Masjid, before a Shahi Dawat-style lunch at Dharampura Haveli, a restored nineteenth-century mansion set well back from the noise of the streets. From there, a private car carries our guests the short way to Gurgaon, and two nights at the Trident or The Oberoi, whichever they prefer.

The penultimate day is the one the golfers have been waiting for, given over entirely to DLF, the golfing leg closing that evening with a farewell dinner. On 1 February, a private transfer runs to the airport, ten days after the welcome drummers first played our guests aboard in Mumbai.

Joining the First Departure

“January is when India gives golfers its best weather. Cool mornings on the fairways, warm afternoons for the forts.”

Access is the one thing worth planning around. Several of these clubs sit among the most exclusive that any golf course India list tends to name; tee times at the private venues are subject to advance confirmation; DLF play is generally kept for overseas guests on weekdays. Cabins, suites and dates are limited too. For anyone who has thought about playing golf in India, yet wished the journey itself lived up to the courses, this is the trip we have wanted to run for years.

We would be glad to bring it within your reach.

Explore the full travel programme here, from the destinations and experiences to the details of each day, and discover how to join the first departure.

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Inside Royal Greens & Rails, India’s First Luxury Golf Experience by Rail

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