Transylvanian horseman

Saturday morning scene

This isn't a scene that readers are likely to have encountered this morning, or indeed any time recently. I was visiting the logging railway at Viseu de Sus. The train was returning to the depot, and stopped where the line runs down the side of a dirt road so that the crew could visit a convenient shop. There is no fixed timetable, so casual stops for shopping and photography are possible. Whilst we were stopped, two local people led their horses past the train. The horses looked at the escaping steam with some curiosity, however they passed calmly.

Why railway crossings have flashing red lights

This photo shows what happened last night when a neighbour (who has the good fortune still to be alive, though bruised and shaken) drove across the railway line without heeding the flashing red lights. He was sober but tired and, we may assume, most inattentive.

At this point, trains run no faster than 50mph (80km/hr). The locomotives all have large, powerful headlights. My neighbour was very careless indeed.

In addition to having a wrecked car to replace, the railway company has sent him a bill for 30,000 euro ($50,000) for damage to the locomotive. Ouch!

With Mariuta at Viseu de Sus

I had the good fortune to be invited by my friends Daniel and Irina to join them at Viseu de Sus in the Maramures yesterday, 1 May. It was Daniel's birthday on 30 April, so we had a party the night before, of course. The real attraction, however, was to go out for a ride with Daniel's steam locomotive, the 97 year-old 764.211 Mariuta. This very rare machine, built by Orenstein & Koppel in Berlin in 1910, had stood for over a decade in a park in Bucuresti before being rescued and restored to full working order.

The ride took us over 30km (20 miles) each way through the deeply forested Vaser valley, on the last narrow-gauge logging railway operating in Romania. As ever at Viseu, it was a slow journey. We stopped at a linseside shop for forest workers to buy provisions, then a few kilometres further on for a Frontier Police railcar to pass us. (Viseu de Sus lies immediately south of the border with the Ukraine. The Frontier Police have a curious vintage minibus mounted on railway wheels. Once I saw them loading a deer carcase into this bizarre railborne patrol vehicle.) There were plentiful photo stops too, where Daniel, Mike Morton (a British travel agent who promotes Romania) and I ran forward, then stopped and photographed the train running up to us. This included stops for each of the three tunnels. I've posted a photo taken between the second and third tunnels, on a short stretch of flat land between the rushing Vaser river and the rock face where the tunnel began.

A highlight was a short ride on the footplate of Mariuta. I had just space to stand at the back of the cab without interfering with the work of the driver (who manipulated the regulator to control speed on the uphill run) and the fireman (who fed the firebox with logs and operated the injector to add water to the boiler.) Two glass windows gave a view forward from the footplate, whilst Mariuta rocked and swayed on the lightly-laid and rather wobbly track. A low-speed narrow-gauge line like this needs far less maintenance than a conventional passenger railway.

Some 20km (14 miles) up the line, we caught up with a second steam train, which had been chartered by a group of Japanese enthusiasts. We stopped for photographs of the two trains alongside, then headed off ahead. Even at Viseu nowadays, it isn't common to see two steam train alongside. But here we were, in a roadless valley in the midst of the deep Carpathian forest, enjoying a rare scene. Even the weather co-operated, giving us shafts of sunsine whilst the overall dampness made the steam hang photogenically in the air.

Arrival at Faina station, the end of our outbound trip and a key logging camp two-thirds of the way up the line, signalled time for lunch. In the chilly early afternoon we barbecued welcome hot food, and sipped warming home-made plum brandy from plastic cups. A few flakes of snow fluttered down around us. Winter is still close by in these high, remote forests, as a glance up at the still snow-capped peaks above us confirmed.

The trip back down the valley was something of a jockeying for position. First, a diesel-hauled timber train rumbled down through Faina. After some shunting, the Japanese photographer's train departed. A couple of stations down the line, we caught them up, but couldn't pass because they were ahead of us on the same line. The frontier police in their curious blue railcar took the opportunity to slip by on the loop line. The Japenese train set off, however we passed it in a siding further down the line, picking up freight cars with logs. In the lead, we set off briskly (meaning about 15km/hr on the Viseu system, since we wished to remain on the ricketty rails.) Down the winding valley we slowly snaked. On the outside balcony of the last car, Mike remarked over the slow clicketty-clack of wheels on the rail joints, "this part of the journey always seems to take a long time." A protracted stop by the railside shop proved the point.

The final part of our journey required no locomotive at all. Outside the depot, the locomotive was uncoupled and puffed and clanked its way off to its shed. The points were reset, and our conductor simply released our carriage's handbrake. Logging railways such as Viseu generally are built on a gradient so that loaded trains can descend by gravity, and we used this characteristic to run almost silently past the depot and down into the carriage sidings behind the station, where the brake was applied and we stopped. It was a curious end to a long and unusual day. The occasional trip by iron horse makes a pleasant contrast to riding my flesh and blood horses.

Restaurant car - logging train style

When we visited the logging railway, it was our good fortune to travel in a car with a wood stove for heating. Not wanting to waste this useful resource, we used it to cook our breakfast, filling the car with a fine smell of frying and toasting. In fact, the flat top of the stove, scraped clean of rust and the remnants of previous meals, made an excellent hotplate to toast bread. Sausages cooked well on sticks held over the fire.

Europe's last logging railway

Danielle and I have been away for two days, visiting Viseu de Sus in the Maramures, two and a half hours from here by car. Viseu is the terminus of the last narrow gauge logging railway in Europe, and the last 50km out of several thousand that used to function in Romania. Nowadays, the railway is entirely operated by diesel locomotives and railcars, although there are also summer steam trains for tourists and enthusiasts. Our train comprised a diesel railcar towing a passenger car, going to collect forest workers at the end of their week in the roadless Vaser valley. Unusually in this modern world, the train is their only link to civilisation.

We travelled 30km up the line, a six-hour round trip that included an hour waiting in a siding for a loaded timber train to pass in the opposite direction. (I put this time to good use by sleeping, after getting up before 6am to get to the depot. It was warm enough outside in the sun to doze comfortably.) I've posted a shot of the freight train, which was transporting some fifteen loaded timber cars. The whole emsemble made about 15mph downhill, rumbling and bumping, clattering over the rail joints. That's about as fast as the lightweight track allows.

The timbers are, in fact, loaded across pairs of bogies with each end of a bundle of timbers on a bogie. Each pair of bogies are attached to one-another under the timbers by cables, and then the outside end of each pair is coupled to other pairs with steel pin-and-link couplers. It's a flexible arrangement that allows timbers of various lengths to be transported, so long as all the timbers put across a pair of bogies are the same.

Since the train has no continuous brake along its length, brakemen are spread out along the train, about one for every three pairs of bogies. Their job is to regulate the speed of the train on the variable downhill gradients of the Vaser valley. The locomotive brakes alone are not sufficient. When the driver whistles three times in succession, each brakeman screws on the brakes on his bogie, to bring the train to a stop. Two blasts on the whistle mean that the brakes must be released.

Writing history at Viseu de Sus

The final sentences in the last chapter of a long book are being written in front of my eyes. This book is the illustrious history of the working railway steam locomotive. From the early pioneers two centuries ago, through the gamut of Brunel’s broad gauge curiosities, the brass-clad Victorian works of art, the hard-working freight locomotives and the splendid high-speed steamliners, to this, the very last working steam locomotive in Europe. Here, at Viseu de Sus, in the Maramures region of northern Romania, history is being written, quietly, almost unobserved.

On a bleak March morning, a handful of men prepare a single narrow-gauge steam locomotive for the day ahead. The fire is lit, the bunker filled with coal, the side tanks replenished with water. Unadorned dusty black 764.408 simmers in the bitter mountain air, on a rickety track, in a yard where the grubby snow is scattered with ash. The driver and fireman board and, with a whistle, the 40-tonne locomotive puffs and clanks making up its train. A passenger car in the last stages of decrepitude, a van carrying stores and firewood, and a rake of timber bogies form an empty train, ready to enter the road-less Vaser valley. The passengers board – a group of forest workers with knapsacks of provisions, an old lady who lives somewhere up the valley, a track repair gang with their tools, and me.

The journey begins slowly, winding between houses and gardens and the steep hillside, as the train sloughs off Viseu town. After a stop to buy provisions at a road-side kiosk, where a bumpy village road and uneven rails share a narrow thoroughfare, we continue. A wake of white steam hangs behind us, blending into the snowy slopes. It is a cacophony as train wheels clatter over bumpy rail joints, the locomotive exhaust roars, wagon buffers clash. In the Vaser valley, the thaw has brought enormous quantities of fractured ice into a metres-deep chaotic jumble. Houses and fields were flooded, however the line escapes damage. We head on into the forest, closing ranks with the river as the beetling mountains gather about us, hemming us in.

At the triangular junction of Delta Novat, the fireman jumps down and sets the points for the Ihoasa valley.The Ihoasa branch was built in the 1950’s, apparently in somewhat of a hurry. Hardly a metre of line is straight or level, and the route has a pronouncedly serpentine character. Whole sections cling to the mountainside, suspended on a narrow ledge above a rushing river.

At the first station, Poaina Novat, a little community clusters around the forestry house, where green-clad foresters give and especially receive “protocol” – hospitality which ensures that each forester retains a girth in proportion to his importance. At the second station, Ihoasa, a collection of tumbledown huts alongside the uneven rails, the train terminates. The whole bumping, clanking journey took just over two hours. However the fun hasn’t finished. After the locomotive has taken water from a lineside stream, it heads off alone up a steep siding, where the gradient reaches a tortuous (by railway standards) 1 in 17. This is why the Ihoasa branch remains steam-hauled. The railway’s diesel locomotives lack the guts to handle this steepest of tracks. Not only must loaded wagons be brought down (with brakemen controlling the wagons), but the new rake of empties must be propelled uphill.

It is an incredible sensation to stand by the track, in thigh-deep snow, watching this last steam locomotive straining every tube of its boiler and rivet of its chassis to thrust a rake of empty cars uphill. The roaring exhaust buffets the ears, the plume of exhaust steam reaches high amongst the treetops, the wagons twist and turn to follow the sinuous line in front of the locomotive. It is deeply impressive and, busily taking photographs, I almost forget that I stand simultaneously a pace back from the path of the train and a pace in front of the chasm through which the river tumbles far below.

We travel back to Viseu slowly, with a dozen loaded freight cars, reliant for stopping power on a team of brakemen spread along the train. It is they, rather than the locomotive, who do the real work on the gravity-powered return journey.

At the depot gate, 764.408 joins a line of trains waiting to enter the rambling sawmill for unloading. It is a train-jam made up of three timber trains, jostling on the narrow rails. It is time to disembark, bid goodbye, and set off into the winter evening gloom, leaving behind this fascinating relic that daily writes history. Long may it run through the deep, dark Carpathian forests.