Iron Horse

Iron Horse

Phnom Penh To Battambang By Train

First published in ‘Beyond the Pancake Trench – Road Tales from the Wild East’ by Orchid Press in 2004.

Also published in Farang Magazine

6am Phnom Penh Train Station. Fifteen or so wagons have been lined up on platform one. There will be only one train today. The Khmers only have one train to travel west. Tomorrow the same train will return to the capital. Passengers crowd around the wagons. Tickets are cheap, a few riel per kilometer. Soldiers patrol up and down the wagons, smoking casually. Mothers clutching babies are climbing into the carriages. There are no seats. Some carriages are made from wood, some from steel. Those ones are already hot and the sun is barely up. Drinks sellers, food sellers, watch and sunglass sellers all hustle for business. Fried frogs for breakfast, quails anyone? Or how about some delicious chuncky grubs that a young woman carries in a wide basket, balanced on her head. They’ll be even cheaper than the train ticket.
Until quite recently the train had one armored carriage, topped by a machine gun, just in case. And the first wagons, open flat beds in front of the engine were used to detect mines on the tracks. The first carriage was free, the second half price. In short, the trains are worse than in Britain, but travel can be the experience of a lifetime.

Cambodia is not famed for its infrastructure. Thirty years of foreign meddling, war and revolution have left the country in tatters and the Khmers have limited options to get around their shattered country. Most of the roads, except for the area around the temples of Angkor, are still in appalling condition. Planes are far too expensive for ordinary Khmers. Commerce is limited and more than 80% of Khmers have never been to Angkor, unlike the 300.000 tourists that arrived there by plane last year.
There’s only one other option for Cambodia to get on the move – the two train lines.
The Battambang Express crosses the width of the country and races down 275 km of wonky tracks from the capital in a mere sixteen or so hours. No, average speeds don’t go much above 20 km an hour.
The Battambang Express is a legacy of the French colonial occupation, the tracks were laid in the 20s.

The train slowly grind out of the station. The carriages are full to bursting point. In former goods wagons, families, with half their households stacked against the carriage walls, cower in semi-darkness. There are no first or second class carriages, no restaurant wagon. The Orient Express it ain’t. The roof is crammed with people. It’s the air-con option. Either you suffer in suffocating darkness or you get blinded and risk a sun-stroke.
The train shuffles in a wide curve past Pochentong Station, next to the airport. The French station building is a bombed out shell. Every other station building along the way to Battambang is wrecked. Old carriages lie abandoned by the tracks. They are all occupied. But no one is traveling anywhere. People have made their homes here.

As the train pulls out into the countryside, the sun rises quickly above burnt paddy fields under a bleak gun metal sky. We pass through villages and small towns, wooden shacks lining the tracks, people interrupting their work, a break in a hard dull routine. On my wagon, military, monks and civilians share snacks served by kids that jump on and off the wagons. A gang of really tough youths, dressed in rags, accepts ready cut long pieces of wood for construction from anyone along the road. As the train ambles through a village, men by the side of the tracks hand up the wood. Two boys grab one end each (often these pieces are 5 or more metres long) and race across the carriages to the end of the moving train where all their loot is stashed. In Battambang they will sell the wood and then pay people the next day when the train returns.

There are no toilets. Parts of the track and surrounding countryside are still peppered with land mines, so the train barely ever stops. Around midday the Battambang Express grinds to a temporary halt in the town of Pursat, the biggest town on the way. Pursat doesn’t look much more together than the previous villages. The station building is but a wall. A snooker table stands next to the tracks in the sun. A few kids on crutches and in wheelchairs are looking at the Iron Horse pull in. As the train stops mothers hold their babies out of the windows and douse them in cool water. Half the passengers get off to take a leak but no one goes too far - for most the station wall will do. As I stand facing the wall, the guys next to me suddenly turn and run off. The train has started moving again. Hundreds of people are rushing back to the carriages, jumping through open doors and climbing the steel ladders attached to the ends of carriages to get back on the roof. As I reach the train, now moving fairly swiftly, there is a bit of a queue to get on the ladder, kids and women, old men and me have to jog along the carriage. An old woman is half way up the ladder when she loses her grip and slides down. Down and between the tracks and she’s gone. Relatives are screaming for the train to halt, but the message is slow to travel to the engine and the train never does stop. More passengers, including myself, brave the ladder. A few people jump off and we’re gone, back into the flat expanse of rice fields that seems to stretch into infinity. As we roll towards a beautiful sunset and our final destination, a young monk next to me comments, “A few years ago everybody would have started shooting in the air and the train would have stopped straight away. Today even the soldiers on the next carriage weren’t armed.”

Link to Article 'The End of the Despot's Road' - Pol Pot's Grave

Link to Article 'The Sounds of Phnong' - Cambodian hilltribes on the margins

Link to Article 'Tombraiders in Cambodia' - Plunder of prehistoric artefacts continues