Sunday 1 June 2008

The Circle Line, Yangon

In March 2008, I made my first visit to Myanmar (formerly Burma). This was before the tragedy of Cyclone Nargis, which has brought such devastation to an already-poor population and exposed the shortcomings of the present military regime to wider scrutiny.

The British were largely responsible for establishing the infrastructure in Burma and an extensive metre-gauge railway was established. There is an excellent short description of the railways in steam days at Mike's Steam Pages.

The then capital Rangoon (now called Yangon and no longer the administrative capital) was provided with a double-track suburban line configured as a circle and this still provides an important transport link. I made a clockwise tour of the Circle Line during my trip and took a number of pictures.

My journey started (and finished) at the main station in the city, shown above. In steam days, this station was known as Phayre Street and there's a picture on Mike's Steam Pages taken from more or less the same viewpoint as above. With the sun shining on the modern gilded towers behind the long-distance platform, my picture makes the station look quite attractive, but I'm afraid the suburban platforms are definitely shabby.

The diesel locomotives are rather 'battered'. The coaching stock on the Circle Line Trains is quite basic (windows are simply unglazed frames and there are no doors) but I didn't discover another shortcoming until later. At each of the frequent stops, the rear coach in which I was riding kept oscillating back and forth on the slack in the 'chopper' couplings. I couldn't understand why the driver didn't lightly hold the brake on the train for the safety of people getting on and off. Eventually, I found the answer. Although the coaches were originally vacuum-fitted (as evidenced by the partial rigging and the steel pipework remaining), vacuum hoses, vacuum cylinders, most of the rigging and the brakeblocks had been removed. The train was unbraked, relying upon the locomotive brake!

Whilst the track isn't too bad near the main station with a fair amount of concrete sleepers and modern rail fastenings, it deteriorates further out. Here, rails are frequently spiked to elderly wooden sleepers which are quite widely spaced and with indifferent ballasting. Rail gaps are very variable (sometimes with a short piece of rail plugging the gap) and with frequent missing fishbolts, as my photographs show.

I'm afraid these standards are typical of the infrastructure in Myanmar, which has suffered from years of neglect.

Signalling appears somewhat better - colour light with point machines, although it's quite possible that, given an opportunity to look inside some of the sturdy signalling location cases, I'd have been disappointed. I did pass one station with a manual signal box and rod-operated points (using steel tubes for rodding, similar to the Great Western). Unfortunately, I didn't manage to get any photographs.

For a non-railway description of my visit to Yangon, click here.

'Lion' and the Pumphouse

View of the Pumphouse from the street (from a photograph by David Neish).

In 1992, National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside conducted an extensive survey on the pumping shed at Princes Dock which had housed LION from the 1870s until the 1920s, prior to the demolition of the shed. By this time, the shed had reached a stage of extreme dilapidation.

Loraine Knowles, then the Head of the Regional History Department, allowed the Old Locomotive Committee to publish a synopsis of the survey, from which this report is derived.

The pumping shed was constructed during the late 1860s, at the South end of a graving dock facility within the Prince's Dock, in order to pump dry the graving dock. The graving dock itself was formed from a redundant link between the Prince's and George's Docks.

This building was originally built to accommodate the steam locomotive LION, re-arranged as a stationary engine. LION was removed when electrically-driven pumps were installed in the late 1920s, allowing part of the building to be converted as a maintenance garage. Most of the available drawings date from this change to electric pumping and the building was little changed thereafter. Unfortunately, these drawings do not show all details of the main chimney associated with the building or of the internal timber platform which was used to store coal and give access to LION's firehole door for firing.

The survey found that a number of details differed from the drawings, possibly because the original proposals were unworkable or incomplete or for reasons of cost-saving.

View of the Pumphouse from the street and an aerial view of the site being cleared for redevelopment.

Detail Front Elevation and Section (measured drawing by Kingham Knight Associates for the survey).

Building Plan, Front Elevation and Rear Elevation (measured drawing by Kingham Knight Associates for the survey).

Cross Section A-A, Side Elevation (facing river), Side Elevation (facing Dock Road) (measured drawing by Kingham Knight Associates for the survey).

View of roof, showing louvres, and internal view showing roof construction.

A plan showing the arrangement of LION in the pumphouse.

Another plan showing LION in the pumphouse and the drive via bevel gears to the chain pump.