Issue 14.07 - July 2006
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Train to the Roof of the World 

China’s new 1,200-mile railway crosses some of the harshest terrain on the planet. Plug in your oxygen supply. All aboard the Tibet express.
By David WolmanPage 1 of 3 

To score a ride sitting shotgun in a locomotive bound for Lhasa, it helps to like beer. I’ve just ditched my guide and wandered up to an unfinished train station at the edge of a dusty town high on the Tibetan plateau. Migrant workers, mostly Tibetans and Hui Muslims, wield sledgehammers, shovels, and drills, hurrying to finish work before midsummer. On July 1, China will celebrate the opening of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, the highest rail line in the world. Its 1,200 miles of tracks traverse 342 miles of permafrost, much of it at altitudes exceeding 13,000 feet. The end of the line is Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, the restive province China has been trying to subdue for half a century.

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As I pace the gravel platform next to the tracks, the locals keep looking my way and I feel awkward and conspicuous. Veiling my nerves behind sunglasses, I keep in mind that, despite their stares, the people here are somewhat familiar with foreign visitors. Western companies involved in the project – Nortel, General Electric, Quebec-based transportation giant Bombardier – sometimes send reps out here to check on progress.

A locomotive emerges from a pass between two mocha-colored mountains. For nearly two weeks, I’ve ping-ponged across China to learn about this train, and now may be my only chance to climb aboard. I find a guy on the platform who speaks half-decent English and explain my interest in hitching to Lhasa. He says the train is still off-limits – the Golmud-Lhasa line isn’t open yet – but I figure it can’t hurt to ask.

When the engine chugs to a halt, I walk to the very front and find the train’s two engineers. With the help of my new English-speaking friend, I declare my unbridled love for trains, show my passport as requested, and make a plea for a ride. The engineers look perplexed. People in these parts get rattled by out-of-the-ordinary occurrences – like an unannounced visit from an American trainiac asking for a ride to Lhasa. Anything related to Tibet can attract unwanted attention from authorities. The subject is a minefield of political, religious, and cultural tension. During my trip, I met foreign visitors who dismissed this concern as paranoia – “the old China,” they said. But the new China hasn’t yet taken hold in the wild west, especially when it comes to the T-word. A few questions here, a license plate number jotted down there, and six months later – after the foreigners have safely returned home – police or state security officials knock on someone’s door, or make a few quiet phone calls that lead to the loss of a job, or worse.

The engineers eventually make a decision of sorts. Because the train doesn’t leave for another five hours, they invite me to join them for lunch in town. “During the afternoon,” the English speaker says, “they’ll decide if you can ride the train.”

Twelve of us pile into a van and are soon seated in a grimy restaurant overlooking the main street, where Tibetans cruise around on colorfully painted motorcycles or play pool on tables set up outside. Wearing a navy-blue cap backward, one of the engineers – I’ll call him Lee – eats only a few bites of pig’s foot stew, tofu and beef, and lamb soup, but drinks cup after paper cup of Lhasa Beer. Every couple of minutes, one of the guys in our lunch party makes a toast, calling out, “Gan bei!” (“Dry glass!”) at which point everyone is obliged to drain their cup. Lee leads another chugging charge precisely when I need a respite from the drinking. The elevation here is well over 14,000 feet, after all. At this altitude, the effect of alcohol is magnified and could do who knows what when combined with the Diamox I’ve been popping. (The drug is the same stuff high-altitude mountaineers take to keep their brains from swelling.) But Lee wants me to drink. Holding up his cup of beer, he looks at me with glassy eyes. If I don’t gan bei, he says, I can’t ride the train. I grab my beer and knock it back, finishing before anyone.

Two hours later I’m sitting in the front of the locomotive, my nose no more than 20 inches from the windshield. Lee naps in preparation for his nighttime shift at the controls. The other driver flips open his cell phone to show me pictures of Lhasa’s Potala Palace, the spiritual epicenter of Tibetan Buddhism and once home to the exiled Dalai Lama. Straightening up in his chair, the engineer repositions his logbook on the console, makes a call on his walkie-talkie, and pulls a silver lever. The train engine lets out two jarringly loud hisses, then starts moving. Staring out at the shimmering tracks and concrete-reinforced embankment extending to the horizon, I can’t help but think of the senior Chinese scientist who confessed to me that the rail line he helped build might not be safe for long.

Ever since Tibet was incorporated into the People’s Republic of China in 1951, Chinese leaders have dreamed of a railway that would link the mountainous province with the rest of the country. Such a rail line would be a long-distance lasso drawing the people and resources of the far west closer to central control. It would also provide an efficient means of transporting Chinese settlers, troops, and weapons into Tibet and the disputed border with India.

In 1955, Mao Zedong sent a team to the Tibetan plateau to investigate the feasibility of track construction, but engineering obstacles, political upheavals, and funding shortfalls stalled the project. During a meeting with King Birendra of Nepal in 1973, Mao confided, “If the railway is not constructed, I can’t even fall asleep.”

The chairman died in 1976. Three years later, China completed construction on the 500-mile stretch from Xining, in western China, to Golmud, at the foot of the Kunlun Mountains. (Regular service began in 1984.) Not until 2001 did construction start on the much more difficult Golmud-Lhasa leg. But the newly rich, construction-mad Chinese government made up for lost time: In the past five years, 100,000 workers laid about 700 miles of track over some of the harshest geography on the planet. In its entirety, the Qinghai-Tibet railway stretches 1,215 miles, and most of the new portion runs over terrain with elevations between 13,000 and 16,000 feet – cruising altitude for some commuter flights.

It is the largest construction project built on permafrost since the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was completed in 1977. Nearly half of the new track crosses this permanently frozen subsoil, which can become unstable if it thaws. And if that’s not enough of an engineering challenge, the line also runs over a major fault in the Kunlun Mountains, where a magnitude 8.1 earthquake struck in 2001. Nevertheless, beginning this month, trial runs on the line will give people from Beijing, Shanghai, and other major Chinese cities direct rail access to Lhasa.

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