The steam age lives on
IN THE dust of the Gobi desert in China’s far west, ultra-modernity sweeps past an eddy of industrial history in one of railway transportation’s most remarkable close encounters. As we reported on November 9th, hundreds of kilometers of track are being laid across the bleak, wind-swept landscape to connect the country’s fast expanding bullet-train network with Xinjiang, a region bordering on Central Asia. Near Sandaoling, a grim and remote mining town on the edge of Xinjiang, the new line runs close to the world’s largest concentration of steam locomotives in active service. China not only leads the world in the building of high-speed railways, but is also one of the few places in the world still using a rail technology that is teetering on the brink of global extinction
When the new line opens – at the end of 2014, officials hope – railway enthusiasts will be eager to savour its nearly 1,800 kilometres (1,200 miles) of thrills between Lanzhou in Gansu province and Urumqi in Xinjiang: a dash across the Tibetan plateau through snow-covered mountains (up to an altitude matching that of Tibet’s oxygen-thin capital, Lhasa), followed by a streak across the Gobi where winds are so strong that even plodding conventional trains have been derailed (read our aforementioned story to see how engineers have tackled that hazard). But serious railway-buffs will want to get off well short of Urumqi in the town of Liushuquan, and then head into the desert by expressway (another ribbon of Gobi-modernity that was completed just last year) to Xinjiang’s largest open-cast coal mine in Sandaoling, a few kilometres away. To aficionados it is the holy grail of steam.
The mine, which opened in 1970, is on a branch of the old railway line between Lanzhou and Urumqi (in the desert the bullet-train line runs roughly parallel to the old track, which like the mine is a legacy of the Mao era). When the bullet trains start running, coal diggers in the area expect their business to boom; the plan being to dedicate the old line to freight which should make transporting coal much cheaper. Every day Sandaoling uses steam locomotives to haul thousands of tonnes of coal out of the vast pit. Around 20 are still in use, far more than an enthusiast can expect to see at work in one place anywhere else. I compiled this brief video clip of a few I encountered in a yard at the end of a long dirt track that skirts the edge of the mine.
This was a sight comparable to the experience, also only to be had in China, of seeing dozens of pandas in one spot (research into the sex lives of pandas afforded me that rare opportunity six years ago). It is one, very probably, that far fewer people have seen. Steam trains fell out of common use in America in the 1950s and in Britain a few years later. China has been far slower to abandon them. The last ones in the world on a main line were retired only in 2005 (a freight service in the northern region of Inner Mongolia). In 1999 China became the last country to give up manufacturing steam locomotives. Coal being plentiful and labour cheap, however, small numbers remain in industrial use here and there; making China a magnet for steam lovers. Sandaoling is not for the casual day-tripper. Remote, inhospitable and foreigner-wary, its locomotives, unlike Sichuan province’s readily accessible pandas, are usually visited only by the determined. The Railway Magazine, a British journal, reported this month that steam action on such a scale in Britain or America, if it existed, “would result in hundreds, if not thousands, of enthusiasts on every promontory, but Sandaoling is one of the remotest places on the planet.”
The few who make it chronicle their visits, and the travails of getting to Sandaoling, in painstaking detail online (SY-Country, a website named after China’s common SY-class of steam locomotive, has a good collection of such reports as well as sketch maps of Sandaoling showing the Xibolizhan yard where this blog’s pictures of JS-class engines were taken). The normal practice is to join an officially sanctioned group with a mine official as guide; individual visitors are sometimes bothered by police and turned away from hotels in the adjacent mine-run town. Real enthusiasts spend days in the desert spotting locomotives; the truly hard core go in winter when temperatures plunge far below freezing, showing off the steam at its billowy best.
My brief trip, helped by a local resident who knew the mine’s unpaved and unmarked roads and seemed indifferent to signs prohibiting non-mine vehicles, kept me below the authorities’ radar screen. Staff at the yard chatted about their locomotives as if used to curious foreigners wandering across the tracks. There were no other visitors, apart from my two taxi drivers from Hami, the nearest big city about 100km to the east. They had no idea that such an eye-catching rarity existed out in the Gobi. Hami has few competing attractions; a relentless government-led pursuit of modernity in recent years having erased old parts of the ancient Silk Road city. (Its main railway station is in the throes of a makeover to make it look suitably imposing and state-of-the-art for the bullet trains; see here for an artist’s impression of how it will look).
How long will Sandaoling keep its steam? Roger Croston, a British rail-enthusiast, says Sandaoling mine has a large depot for spare parts, most of which it can make in its own workshops. “They even forge their own rivets which they throw across the workshop floor red-hot into a heap,” he says. Retired locomotives are cannibalised. But enthusiasts fret that the end is nigh. A sign by the Xibolizhan yard predicts that the open-cast mine could run out of recoverable reserves as early as 2020. Mr Croston says steam everywhere in China is threatened by a common desire to put on a modern appearance. Steam locomotives are sometimes being replaced by older diesel ones. In Sandaoling “the locals think we are mad”, he says. “All they are i nterested in is the high-speed trains.”
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