Travels through Burma.
While restrictions have eased on public transport, perhaps Myanmar/Burma is a bit too far to consider for your first venture back on the tracks.
But former National Rail Awards judge Clive Fletcher-Wood suggests it’s certainly worth considering for your bucket list, after travelling to Asia before the Coronavirus pandemic took hold (“I got back just in time”) on a tour of Second World War battlefields.
And Clive found plenty of interest for railway enthusiasts: “The Irrawaddy is an extremely wide river at Mandalay. The new bridge is solely for road traffic, but the original bridge was (I think) built initially for rail traffic, being subsequently widened to take a lane of road traffic on each side [picture 1].
“It was blown up twice in WW2 - once by the retreating British/ Indian Army in 1942, then again by the Japanese in their retreat in 1945. By chance a light locomotive crossed while we were there [picture 2].
“The well-dressed chap (he’s wearing a longhi around his waist) holds two flags - red for road traffic and green for the train [picture 3].
“Given the nature of the bridge and the potential consequences of a derailment, it’s hardly surprising that there are orthodox check-rails all the way across the bridge [picture 4].
“We spent some time, however, puzzling over the 60-foot rail lengths turned on their side and joined by fishplates in the orthodox way, which also run the length of the bridge. An engineer with
me was convinced that they wouldn’t offer any benefit to the bridge in terms of structural integrity, so we concluded that they had been installed as an additional form of check-rail, outside the running rails rather than within them.
“What was particularly interesting was that all the rails which we could see were marked ‘Barrow Steel 1897’ [picture 5]. We assumed that these rails had served their time as track before being used in this way.” Back in January 2019 ( RAIL 869), Stop &
Examine featured Clive’s report on a trip to Pakistan, including his photograph of the 1914 weighing scales at Lahore station.
“But this steel is 123 years old and still performing a useful function,” he says.