The rail station with no trains
US sanctions on North Korea block a link to Europe
Every week for the past 12 years, a small team has headed past military checkpoints and barbed wire fences to the farthest northeast corner of South Korea, where they clean a railway station that never sees any trains.
Apart from a few neverused metal detectors, the spotless station lies completely empty. Indeed, only one passenger train has ever arrived at Jejin station in Goseong: It came from North Korea in 2007.
It is hard to imagine now that this mothballed, remote station could one day play a significant role in South Korea’s political and economic future, but South Korean officials are holding out hope that it will — and what is more, that this station could help open up North Korea, too.
Kim Jung Ja, a 60-year-old real estate agent in a nearby town, said that property prices had jumped in anticipation of a reopened railroad connection to the North. “Could there be a train to Russia from here?” she wondered aloud.
There’s a catch, however. For South Korea to actually reconnect its rail network to North Korea, it will first have to convince the United States to reconsider the “maximum pressure” policy towards Pyongyang. That seem unlikely anytime soon.
During their meeting in the peninsula’s demilitarised zone in late-April, South Korean President Moon Jae In handed Kim a USB stick that contained detailed plans for an interKorean rail network. The two Korean leaders agreed to work towards reconnecting their rail network, built under Imperial Japan at the turn of the 20th century, then severed during the Korean War in the 1950s.
Seoul wants to move full steam ahead into the plan, with engineers already heading north of the border to inspect the tracks and plans being made to finally connect Jejin to other stations in South Korea. “We cannot go further,” said Moon Chung In, an influential adviser to the South Korean President. “Why? Because of the sanctions regime.”
“It’s so stressful that the United States is so controlling,” said Song Young Gil, a South Korean politician who recently inspected North Korea’s railways for the president’s office.
For many South Koreans, the prospect of reconnecting the rail link to North Korea is one of the most evocative, even romantic, aspects of the Korean detente. It represents not only a step towards eventual reunification of North and South but a correction to the cruel 20th-century history that made their nation an “island” without an open land border.
An east coast line through Jejin would start at Busan, South Korea’s second-largest city. In North Korea, it would pass through the Mt Kumgang tourist zone and Wonsan, a weapons-industry hub converted into a beach resort. It would reach Rason, an ice-free sea port. From there, travellers would go on to the Russian border, where there are links to Vladivostok and beyond. In theory, a train could continue to Europe on what’s been dubbed the “Iron Silk Rail Road.”
South Korean experts believe that this trade and tourism could help open up North Korea politically. However, a complete renovation of North Korea’s railways could run easily into billions of dollars, with much of the cost borne by South Korea.
The two Koreas first agreed to reconnect their rail systems in 2000. A North Korean train finally arrived in Jejin on May 17, 2007. In 2008, a North Korean soldier fatally shot a South Korean tourist who wandered into a restricted area in the Mount Kumgang resort, and the train service was shut down.