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RIDING THE IRON STALLION

The article below by Victor Paul Borg was originally published as a newspaper travel article. 

The blacksmith Yang Fuzheng doesn’t normally work on Sundays but he made an exception on the day we visited him. He greeted us beamingly, dressed in crispy clothes, an erect man with a thin moustache and hair combed up, looking freshly incongruous in the diminutive and cluttered and ramshackle workshop. Perhaps never before did he have visitors appreciative of his anachronistic craft, a traditional blacksmith making spare parts for an equally old steam train that runs outside with great clamour. “This business is now in its third generation, like the train,” Yang told us. “My father learned the trade from his father, and I learned it from my father. It’s a fine craft, and when I was young I could do a hexagonal nut by free forging, which requires good skill, but now I work with a die forge.”

As he talked, Yang heated a rod of metal in the coal-fired oven until it was red-hot. Then he switched on the die forge, the only piece of mechanical equipment in the dim workshop, and the metal monster started pounding away in rapid rhythm. Yang engaged it in a tango – holding the red-hot metal, his hands swinging, his shoulders lolloping, his feet hobbling – nimbly forging the long metal spikes that serve to hold the rail-tracks in place. It was a scene from a bygone era.

Then we smelled the acrid stench of burning coal, and heard the whistles and jangles and hisses, and we stepped outside to herald the steam train as it rumbled into Bajiaogou station. “It’s like a toy,” mused Chen Yong, my travel companion and an eminent aficionado of model trains. “My model trains are more technically advanced, but the paradox is that because it has no electronic controls and everything is manual, the Jiayang train can run whatever the trouble, unlike modern trains, in which even the smallest breakdown in an electric element or circuitry can render the train idle.”

Like Yang’s blacksmith, the Jiayang train has run the line for three generations. It’s the last steam train in China that still runs commercially, and one of the last in the world too. And now, a full 50 years after it was first launched, it continues to make history after it has been saved from the scrap yard. Next year the train will be designated a state-protected historical relic.

Fifty years ago, the train began its journey as a necessity. The story began in World War II when the state company Jiayang Group started extracting coal from a major mine in the mountains of Leshan in Sichuan. At first the coal was hauled on a barge for the journey downriver out of the mountains, but a rail track was designed to substitute the barge after the government dammed the river in 1958.

About 10,000 laborers were mobilized, but the job was arduous, and the construction dragged on for a year to complete the 20km line that pierces six tunnels and meanders along the contours of the mountains. And the company, starved of cash, made compromises: an extraordinarily narrow track of 600mm was laid along an unusually steep gradient of 3.6 percent. The track also curves wildly; the line has more than five bends for every kilometer. These conditions made the track treacherous. It took three days for the train to finish its first run, and for the ensuing year it was beset with failures – the locomotive sliding backwards, derailing, capsizing – and only one of the six expert engineers that were brought in managed to rein and pilot the train. Eventually, after a year, Jiayang stabilized the train by widening the track to a gauge of 762 mm (still narrow compared with the 1435mm standard gauge) and devising a chute that dribbles sand onto the rail-track at the front of the train to increase friction between wheels and tracks.

“The company was very proud then that it had managed to succeed in such difficult conditions,” told us Yuan Chengfang, director of the tourism department at the Jiayang Group.

The coal was eventually mined out by 1988 (now only a small, commercially insignificant mine remains), yet the Jiayang Group continued to operate the train as a social service. There is no road, and the train was – and remains – the only mode of transport out of the mountains for the inhabitants of Bajiaogou, the town that sprouted up at the end of the line on the back of employment opportunities presented by the mine. The ticket price has remained unchanged, at a token of 5 yuan, and the train has run at a loss for 20 years (it takes a staff of 100 to operate the train, and the company has to make all spare parts for the train in its own dedicated workshop). By the turn of the century, the annual operating losses had risen to 2 million yuan.

“In 2004, the provincial government asked us to find ways to minimize our losses and the local people increasingly desired a road,” recounted Yuan, the tourism director. “But when we decided to build a road and retire the train there was an outcry from train enthusiasts, and a lot of media coverage lamenting about the loss of such a valuable piece of industrial heritage.”

The lamentations triggered a reassessment. The provincial government then decided to keep the train running for the sake of heritage preservation, and to foster a local tourist industry as a new economic lifeline for the train and Bajiaogou’s inhabitants. Now three years later, tourism is taking off: around 5,000 visited last year, already offsetting the train’s operating losses by half.

A visit makes for a fascinating trip. Riding on the train or wandering around Bajiaogou is an experience that’s unconscionably evocative. The journey on the train to Bajiaogou, the industrial-communist town, feels like entering a forty-year-old time warp. The town’s urban fabric is stitched of dense and rugged tenements, but the atmosphere of industrialization is strangely quaint and even tranquil – partly thanks to the absence of cars. There are no roads, only alleyways and staircases meandering among the weathered old buildings. It’s a place where you can saunter obliviously without looking over your shoulder. 

Chen and I spent a few days dawdling aimlessly. One day we descended more than 100 meters underground into the defunct mine, seeing the kind of claustrophobic drudgery and toil that miners have to endure. Then we trudged up a nearby slope for a high vista over the valley that cusps Bajiaogou, surrounded by slopes of terraced fields and copses of bamboo and tropical forest.

Other times we lost ourselves in the town’s alleyways, marveling at the architectural tapestries: the cluster of buildings with attic windows built by the British technicians who worked in the mine during the war, the neo classical façades of the former administration building designed by Russian consultants, the squat utilitarian architecture of the old hospital and the drab massively-imposing auditorium. Even Mao Zedong survives on some facades: his fieriness is enshrined in the slogan about the glory of serving the people and elsewhere murals depict the revolutionary in his classical hat and suit and solemn gaze. 

All throughout, in our wanderings, moods passed us in dazzling kaleidoscopes. The whiff of smoldering coal wafts from the egalitarian tenements that are riddled with arches and passages and staircases; the exotic market holds snake blood and herbal medicines and stalls of outdoor dentists and barbers. The elders quack over mahjong sets at the teahouse, the young men play basketball, the women gather at dusk to twirl delicately to music in the town square – and I began to fantasise, as the days passed, about an earlier simpler era.

More local bustle can be found on the train, watching the inhabitants going to town with agricultural produce and coming back laden with meat and household accessories. The locomotive runs like clockwork, taking a full hour to run its course, and the inhabitants have learned to time their lives by its passage. The first passage is breakfast time; the second marks lunch; the fourth marks dinnertime – or, for Yang the blacksmith, the end of the working day. 

We rode back and forth, like prankish teenagers dabbling in joy-riding. Once it occurred to me that the train’s history has now made a full circle of irony: the constraints and challenges that made the train an engineering feat 50 years ago are the same features that now make it a thrilling ride. A straight and flat line would make for a boring ride; it’s the uphill struggle and constant bends – 109 bends to be exact – that makes the ride rousing, as the steam engine heaves and judders and twists like an iron stallion on its first or last run.

Article © Victor Paul Borg