With the arrival of railway construction in towns and rural areas through out western India, the environmental situation and local communities’ relations with resources and work changed during the decade of the 1860s. Not only had the railways as an infrastructure increased speed and capacity in trade; its physical presence had far-reaching effects on how local communities engaged with the environment. This paper examines the implications of colonial infrastructural expansion by asking how on the one hand environmental conditions affected constructions, and on the other, how processes of infrastructural implementation illuminate human interactions with nonhuman nature from a local perspective. With a view to debates on the diffusion of technology, knowledge and the environment, the paper aims to make a contribution to our understanding of how global technologies developed and affected social and material relations in local contexts. As the British Empire solidified its reach through the expansion of infrastructure, local environs and local communities invariably engaged with the implementation and development of technological innovations through continuous encounters and adaptations with the railway. Through these encounters and relationships, the politics of labour and professionalization and the reconfigurations of knowledge and expertise help us in understanding how historical actors constructed and perceived “the environment”. By using archival papers of engineers, contractors and sub-contractors, and official colonial records about infrastructural planning, the analysis focuses on materials, local construction sites and environmental conditions and resources, to discuss how insights into technological systems enable and deepen, sometimes even transform, understandings of past human-natural interactions.