Eritrea: Septuagenarian engineers keep steam train chugging
ASMARA, Eritrea, 26 Mar 2005, (AFP) - At an average age of about
70, most of the men keeping Eritrea’s resurrected steam train riding the rails
are nearly as old as the ageing coal-fired locomotive that pulls the cars.
Called from second
professions or out of semi-retirement to return to the yards to service one of
the world’s last operational steam train engines, they toil diligently to
maintain the relic that first hit the tracks here in 1938.
At the workshop in Asmara’s huge cobweb-infested
central depot, greying, bespectacled workers are assembling axles, rivetting
and going about other activities in a boiler room, foundry and joinery
outfitted with equipment that dates from the golden era of steam trains a
century ago.
Indifferent youth
“I don’t know until what age I’ll work here,”
the head of the boiler room, 64-year-old Beyane Gebrai, says with a sad smile,
lamenting that Eritrean youth seem uninterested in halting the old locomotive’s
slide into obsolescence.
“Some young people know the techniques to work
here, but in general they are not very attracted by the steam engine,” he
sighs. ”It’s dusty, they prefer other things.”
Amanuel Ghebreselassie, manager of the Eritrean
Railways Rehabilitation Project, which restarted the steam train service from
Asmara to the Red Sea port of Massawa in 2002 after a 27-year interruption,
shares the concern.
“Trying to transfer skills to the younger
generation is one of our main objectives,” he says, voicing hope that the
locomotive, with its shrill steam whistle and belching smokestack, will outlive
his septuagenarian staff.
At the moment, they are the only ones willing
and able to ensure that the engine and passenger cars are able to make the
117-kilometer (73-mile) trek from mountainous Asmara at 2,300 meters (7,546
feet) to the coast and back.
At 57, Yemane Yalleou is one of the youngest
workers here and one of several who used to work at Ethiopia’s major train
depot in Dire Dawa, halfway along the major line connecting Addis Ababa with
Djibouti.
After half-a-lifetime of railway work there, he
was expelled with other Eritreans at the start of the Eritrea-Ethiopia border
war in 1998.
Returning to work on the trains after Asmara
decided to restore the rail link between the capital and Massawa was a relief,
he says. ”I worked all my life in the big train repair center in Dire Dawa.”
Mostly in the shed
Despite the dedication of the crew, the steam
train chugs to Massawa only sporadically.
There is no regular rail link “because of a lack
of funds,” Amanuel said, noting that most trips are charter excursions for
groups of mainly European tourists who hire the train for nostalgia’s sake.
“They are real steam engine enthusiasts,” he
said.
To take the train is to make a journey back in
time, back to the turn of the late 19th and early 20th centuries after Italians
who were colonizing the region began construction of the Eritrean railway in
Massawa in 1887.
Completed only in 1911, when the track reached
the summits of Asmara, the line traverses 35 bridges and runs through 30
tunnels across the rugged Eritrean landscape.
Passengers sit on wooden seats, staring out of
paneless windows at stunning ravines and valleys that drift by at a speed of 20
kilometers (12 miles) per hour while on board a woman prepares traditional
Eritrean coffee, first cooking the grains on a stove, then grinding them.
At the half-way point, when the engine needs to
be resupplied with coal and water, the locomotive’s whistle pierces the
mountain air and railway brakemen, another throwback to an earlier age, slow
the train from their posts at the front of each wagon.
Photo courtesy: internationalsteam.co.uk
