China: The Last Days of Steam
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Erdi viaduct on the Jitong line in Inner Mongolia, the last steam worked mainline.
Michael Rhodes -
‘This picture which was taken in February 2004 appears to be very straight forward to obtain and many people would think I simply stood on the hillside with my camera, waited five minutes and captured this image.
The truth behind the picture is somewhat more complex. This is a classic location on the Jitong line on the Erdi viaduct but there are several problems with capturing a picture like this.
First it’s very, very windy in Inner Mongolia and over 300 days a year there are strong winds which would blow the smoke down and obscure the steam train so we needed a day with no wind.
Secondly, it’s very dry in Inner Mongolia and there are very few heavy snowfalls and as you will see in the picture there is a good coating of snow on the hills and that only happens two or three times each winter.
Added to all of that the light is only correct at this location between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. in the winter months and it relies on a train coming during that critical window otherwise the sun swings round and is off the side of the train. And this is in fact my seventh attempt to obtain this image between ‘97 and 2004, and in February of 2004 we woke early one morning to see a clear star filled sky, no wind and a fresh snowfall and we drove immediately to the western side of the Jinpeng pass and were fortunate to see a train waiting in Jinpeng station and we knew that within an hour it would be crossing over Erdi viaduct and so with the temperature registering minus 24C we parked ourselves on the hillside and waited hoping that the wind wouldn’t suddenly get up or a cloud appear and we were fortunate, after what would be a total of seven years of trying to finally get the classic shot on Erdi viaduct.’
Shibanxi station at 5am on the narrow-gauge Bashi Railway in Sichuan province.
Well this is very interesting this is the first train of the morning on the Shibanxi railway or the Jiayang coal railway and its before 5 O’clock in the morning and the locomotive has been put on the carriages ready to take people up the valley to the mine and take people up to the market at Bagou to sell their wares. The driver however has a lot of tasks to do and at the moment he’s in the cab getting coals to light the burners on the platform for the local restaurants and the local station, he’s also arranging to have boiling water taken off the boiler of the locomotive and put into the bean curd pots and the rice cooking pots on the station and he’s even taking boiling water out of the locomotive to make tea at the local restaurant so in spite of just being a locomotive driver he’s also providing coals and water for all of the shops and restaurants on the station.
Train at Huangcunjin on the Bashi railway in Sichuan province.
Michael Rhodes –
‘The Shibanxi railway is also called the Jiayang coal railway and it’s a 20km narrow gauge line which was built in China’s Great Leap Forward to bring coal from the hills down to the river where it went in a barge and then down to Chiong steelworks.
It’s very isolated and 5,000 people live up a valley in a little town where there is no road access and the only way in or out is either on the back of a donkey or by railway. And so the railway was a very exciting and isolated railway serving a community who had no other contact with the outside world. Now of course Westerners came in their droves as soon as steam enthusiasts realised it was operated by steam, and in the late ‘90s and early 2000 the local railway was struggling because they were planning to build a road. They were worried they would have to shut and the manager decided if Westerners would come as tourists maybe the Chinese would and the local university produced a book and they developed a website and now there are hundreds of Chinese tourists coming every weekend to ride on the train which keeps the railway going and keeps the staff in a job. Now this is the end of the line here at Quangkung and we waited for the passenger train to arrive to try and get it passing the people’s homes.
The father and two boys on the left had been running all around the line playing football and they had to come to us for sweets and they so enjoyed Opal Fruits that our Chinese guide persuaded them they could get an extra Opal Fruit if they sat still whilst the train came by to provide a bit of a frame for the railway. There was one slight trouble in that they did it beautifully but our position worried the engine driver who you can see looking out of the steam engine because he was terrrified he was going to hit SS’s tripod which was very close to the line, and we therefore had to leap backwards as the train came past.
Otherwise the use of Opal Fruits proved quite a successful aid to getting a good railway photo.’
A train on the Jitong line passes the pagoda at Lindong in the last few months of steam operation on the line.
This photograph was taken in Oct. 06 and there were only only six weeks to go before steam was removed completely from the Jitong line and at this stage there were still 20 locos working between Chabuga and Daban and indeed the drivers were having fun in that they were no longer observing their coal bonuses and they were driving the locos hard because there was no merit in trying to save money on coal because that system had been abolished with a view to the introduction of diesels.