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.