China... the sun finally sets
It’s the last major real steam show on earth...
Any readers who, like myself, witnessed the last rites of Southern Region steam in 1967 would, at that time, never have contemplated that half a century hence it would still be possible to see steam locomotives of main line origin earning a daily commercial living, in a similar ‘workaday’ condition and sharing the same fate as their British counterparts! The surviving steam activity in China has given many enthusiasts from around the world incredible and previously unimaginable opportunities to relive that magical experience of seeing the steam locomotive working hard in a harsh environment, and going about its daily routine business without any nostalgic influence whatsoever. It is solely down to sound economic planning and plain operational common sense, chiefly influenced by the readily available coal resources and supply of relatively new steam locomotives. China ceased constructing steam locomotives for industrial use just 18 years ago; the last industrial standard ‘SY’ class 2-8-2 rolling out of Tangshan Works in October 1999. However, a number of former China National Railways (CNR) locomotives of ‘JS’ 2-8-2 and ‘QJ’ 2-10-2 classes, chiefly built in the 1980s, were purchased for further use in industry, or even found further main line use on some of China’s provincial railways. There have been a number of notable farewells to main line steam in China over the last two decades. The best known of those centres to receive attention from worldwide photographers were at Zhongwei and Nancha, where steam gave way to diesel in the late 1990s, and arguably the most famous of them all, the Ji-Tong line in the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia, where steam bowed out in late 2005. Although CNR steam clung on in the north of the country until 2002-3, followed by China’s somewhat unrealistic declaration that it would eradicate industrial steam traction entirely by 2008 (coinciding with it hosting the Olympic Games), small pockets of industrial steam
have survived against all odds well beyond that, mainly associated with the coal and steel industries. The ever-decreasing demand for coal in China means that these remarkable survivors have gradually fallen by the wayside, but the large opencast mine at Sandaoling, in the north west of China, has bucked that trend and now has the distinction of being the last major place on Earth where the steam locomotive still clings on in commercial industrial service - and in spectacular fashion. It is complete with a running fleet of up to ten former CNR ‘JS’ class 2-8-2s, which remain at the mine company’s disposal for daily use on services around the clock, seven days per week, working the Sandaoling opencast pit trains; the Nanzhan yard shunt; and the trip workings to the Erjin deep mine east of the town. The Sandaoling Mining Company’s main workshops at Jichang were fully equipped in 1958 to undertake the complete periodic overhaul of the fleet, including wheeldrops and re-profiling, boiler replacements, and the fabrication of smaller spare parts. But, ominously, this equipment was removed during 2015 and the works area was subsequently given over merely to boiler washouts and minor repairs. The adjacent compound has taken on the appearance of a ‘mini Barry scrapyard’ and parts are being robbed from the withdrawn ‘JS’ locomotives, some having languished there for more than a decade. The enthusiasm and professionalism of the friendly crews at Sandaoling ensure that daily company production targets are met, despite the increasing operational challenges that they have to face day in, day out, in much the same manner as the final days of BR steam, 50 years ago. Desert plain The small town of Sandaoling lies approximately 50 miles east of Hami, a town which originally prospered from the ancient ‘Silk Road’. Located in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of north western China, west of the Gobi Desert, the terrain around Sandaoling is arid and desert-like, but about 25 miles to the north and towards the border with Mongolia the Tian Shan (Celestial Mountains) range looms almost 10,000 feet above the desert plain, clearly visible from Sandaoling on all but a few of the cold, clear and generally windswept days experienced during the winter months. For a mining town, it is a remarkably clean and dust-free
place with its most pleasant tree-lined streets and, as China is entirely on Beijing time, during January, the sun does not rise in Sandaoling until around 9.15am, as it is located some 1,500 miles west of the capital. For those photographers who like to capture the early morning atmosphere but still favour a lie-in, this is definitely the place to be! There is invariably a downside of course, and the travelling distance involved from, for example, Beijing means that it is not the most convenient of places to reach; flights operate only every other day to a small regional airstrip at Hami, with a flight time of approximately four hours. The alternative to flying is a combined train and road transit, involving an overnight sleeper plus a further day of rail and bus travel, quite possibly immediately before or after a long-haul flight. It is little wonder that only a handful of the keenest of foreign visitors have made the journey, but this inconvenience is soon forgotten when the traveller gets right amid the near-continuous action!
Extensive network
Although much of the region’s rich reserves of good quality coal continue to be obtained by traditional deep mining methods, regional production significantly increased from 1958 with the opening of this huge opencast mine on the south-west edge of Sandaoling town. The current scale of the pit is over four miles in length and almost one mile in width, to a maximum depth of almost 600 feet. The main coal seam is 45 feet thick. At the height of its production, the output was around 1.5 million tonnes per annum, it employed over 3,000 staff, and fielded a railway system which, at its peak in 2010, amounted to around 100 miles. The railway has historically served not only the transport of coal extracted from the opencast mine, but also the disposal of spoil and rock on seven separate disposal tips; for each ton of coal produced, there’s about ten tons of waste stone. The system has, over time, also served two deep coal mines, a coal washery and grading plant, a byproducts plant and a cement works, and a marshalling yard where loaded trains are made up ready for transfer along the four-mile branch to the CNR exchange sidings alongside the Lanzhou-Urumqi main line, or empties shunted beneath the washery screens. Most of the coal produced is despatched to the industrialized Gansu Province in central China, and some is sent as far away as Shanghai, as well as a lesser volume retained for power station use and local domestic consumption.