Last great steam railroad nears end of line

[Steve]

On the sparsely populated grasslands and mountains of Inner Mongolia, not far from where Genghis Kahn once rode south to plunder the known world, the 175-year era of the mainline steam locomotive is about to end.
Any day now, the world's last long-distance steam-powered passenger train will yield its sleeping cars, diner and coaches to diesel locomotives. No longer will travelers be able to awaken in the middle of the night and raise compartment shades to watch heavy locomotives blast smoke and steam skyward, rocking around curves, their headlights cutting a swath through the darkness and their muffled roar conjuring up dreams.
No longer will long-distance heavy freight trains cast their roaring cadence across the land, perhaps inspiring farm boys to leave the fields for a life in the city, just as many generations were inspired to seek their fortune throughout the late 19th century and early 20th century.
There is no sense of regret in the Chinese government, which is anxious to crush all memory of something as old-fashioned as steam just a few years before the 2008 Olympics reach Beijing.

But there is just a touch of sentimentality in the rail yards and shops at Daban, one of the last steam shops on the Jitong Railway, a 907-kilometer, or 570-mile, line across the rugged province, built to exploit the coal and other resources of the sparsely populated area and to provide an east-west freight bypass for congested Beijing far to the south. Each end of the line has yielded to diesels already, but the division running east from Daban to Chabuga remained the province of steam as the end neared.
Oddly, this is one of the newest rail mainlines in the world, completed in 1995. The World Bank was willing to loan money for construction, but not for locomotives. The cash-strapped government of Inner Mongolia was forced to make do with surplus steam locomotives from the Chinese state railway, which was abandoning steam rapidly.
Once this line goes diesel, there will still be steam locomotives in the world, but they will be found in industrial areas here and there, on special runs, in amusement parks, and on small narrow-gauge lines in Asia, Africa and Europe.
The world of mainline steam, where passenger and freight trains roar along in serious commerce, dies with the dieselization of the Jitong Railway.
At one end of the rail yard at Daban on a day in late September, mechanics with long-handled wrenches fussed lovingly over the workings of a handful of black steam locomotives, while other workers loaded them up with coal or wiped their huge, cylindrical air compressors clean with large rags.
The men in the old yard seemed more like boys, taking turns tooling up and down the racks under a gray and drizzling sky, blowing off huge white jets of steam and sounding their shrill whistles for the sheer fun of it.
"These trains are the best," said Gao Hongbo, 35, as he escorted a visitor into the toasty locomotive cab, opening the firebox door to reveal red-hot coals in the belly of the beast. "I don't know why they don't want to use them anymore."
In fact, Gao knew very well. Indeed, all of the men in the yard knew. Along the hectic road to something called progress, there is very little time for sentimentality. Diesel locomotives are cheaper to operate and maintain, haul heavier loads and can run at faster speeds. And they are more politically correct for a country roaring into the 21st century with enthusiasm. It is as simple as that.
"As the end approaches, I'm feeling strong feelings," Gao said. "It means an era is coming to an end, since foreign countries don't have these anymore. Now is the time for development, and we've got a lot of catching up to do, but my heart tells me these things aren't bad. They're just a little dirty, but there's not much harm in that."
From the workers to the passengers who ride this line, which cuts through vast open expanses of badland and farmland planted in corn, millet and sunflowers, and framed by mountains and narrow roads lined with yellowing poplars, Gao was one of the few people to express any sentiment at all in the matter.
But international railroad fans are already in mourning as they count down the days until the steam whistles are silenced and the old, strangely animate black locomotives with their huge crimson wheels are auctioned off for scrap metal.
"It's the last picture show, and it's a damned good show," said Jim Thomas, a retired business executive from Portland, Oregon.

Tim Lab, an electrician from Owosso, Michigan, said he grew up in a railroad family. His father was a brakeman, then a conductor for the Grand Trunk Western Railway in the United States in steam days. Lab said he knew when his father's train approached and would walk to the line to let his father hand down his lunch pail as the train pulled into the yard.
"They seem almost like beasts, don't they?" asked Gary Hunter from Tucson, Arizona, who a year ago wrote a lengthy article about the Jitong line for Trains Magazine and has visited China six times. "You stand close to one on the line, and it gives off heat. The compressors pant."
Thousands of people like Hunter came to Inner Mongolia in the last years of steam, Europeans, Americans and Japanese by the hundreds. More adventurous than the average tourist, these rail fans often braved the arctic temperatures of the Mongolian winter to walk miles into the country seeking beautiful scenes and the drama of the massive dramatic clouds of steam that blast from such giants in winter.

"It's such a good adventure to shoot steam in the dead of winter where tourists never go," said Ad van Stan of Rotterdam. "It's so impressive. It's live steam in spectacular country, so pure, so original."
There was a dark side to this popularity. Workers in steam shops such as Daban grew greedy, demanding multiple individual bribes to allow photographers into shop grounds for photographs. Scenes sometimes would grow ugly.
And there was the "Jing Peng mafia," the name given to young toughs in leather jackets, driving late-model American and German cars, who drove around demanding payments from rail fans for photo "permits." Americans and Europeans in particular would sometimes refuse to pay and even threaten to form their own larger groups to threaten the "mafia." But the cottage industry of Chinese guides who earned good money showing photographers around the area always paid, even for the stubborn Westerners.
Now there are no more rail fans at Jing Peng Pass, one of the most spectacular twisting mountain passes in China, the railroad division that was the next to last to go diesel.
China is a train lover's paradise, crisscrossed by nearly 70,000 kilometers of operating tracks, with more coming on line every day as the country rushes to open up isolated areas of the interior to cheap passenger and freight traffic. The country has its own rail fans, too, even if the passing of the steam era on the Jitong Railway has received little notice.
On a recent night, the Jitong train was crammed with riders heading home for an extended national holiday. There were revelers, straight-faced poker players, drunks sprawled over whole benches and college students chatting.
"Last year I went to Xinjiang with a bunch of friends, and we took the train," said Xie Lan, a Jilin University student. "Some of my friends wanted to fly, but a couple of us insisted that we take the train, and it was so beautiful. What can you see from an airplane?"
As she spoke, thick plumes of steam, braided and ghostly against the blackened night sky, wafted alongside the train, accompanied by a gently hypnotic clickety-clack.
At the end of the rail yard, on a platform coated with black oil and heavy, yellowish grease, a crew of mechanics completed one of the last overhauls these locomotives will ever see.
"I don't feel a strong sense of regret about this," said Niu Yunpeng, a 37-year-old mechanic and 10-year veteran of the line. "I just feel a small sense of pity, since steam trains have existed for so long, and then all of the sudden, they'll disappear here in Daban.
"It's something hard to express."



Howard W. French of The New York Times reported from Daban, China.

[dario]

Even this came to pass.