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Steam in Chongqing Shi - March 2009

by "TW"

The author of this report has asked to remain anonymous

Chongqing Docks

Chongqing is located in Shichuan province, western China, but, the City of Chongqing is a provincial-level municipality of China, like Beijing and Shanghai. The Chongqing port where many vessels dock is far away from Shanghai along the Jing Jiang river and Chongqing is the final destination of this important river transportation system in China.
It is reported that there are 2 SY working at the port which is called Kau Lung (its name sounds similar to the Kowloon area of Hong Kong). There is plenty of container transportation and it is a very busy place.

I have a business in Chongqing and this is my second visit there. I read a report of steam locomotives on the web and SY working at this port, but this report was made in 2007. My interpreter said that it is impossible to find any live steam in such a big city like Chongqing.
However, I told him to visit there and if no steam, we could see latest Chinese CNR locomotives at the Chongqing shed. I did not expect much, so I only brought a 5M compact digital camera.

We arrived at CNR Chongqing Nan (Chongqing South) station by taxi and we asked a train staff who was previously a driver of steam locomotives about steam locomotives and he told me that steam operation had finished a very long time ago.
We were a little bit disappointed to learn this, but he said that if we went to the shed, we may find something. Then we walked to the shed and visited there, but we could only see many electric locos and some diesel ones. And I realised that we were in the middle of downtown Chongqing and around this area there are plenty of new tall buildings and apartments and understood it was not the atmosphere where there were any steam locomotives.
We walked along the train rail to the main street to get a taxi to go back to the hotel from Chongqing Nan CNR station (this seemed to be a short cut).
After 10 min. walk, I told my interpreter to ask a CNR rail maintenance guy if he knew anything about steam. The maintenance guy said "You can find steam locos are now working near a container yard. You can walk there in 15 min."
I was so exited to hear the news! And then we walked along to the container yard (it is a public road, you don't need to have any authorisation). And finally we heard sound of steam!

SY 1360 is working at the container yard shunting the big wagons. It is the first live steam in 2009 for me. There is a railway connecting to Chongqing Nan CNR station and SY are running also on this line to the CNR station.
We found SY 1236 in cold condition but it appears to be operable. These two SY are well maintained and I enjoyed so much to see a real steam locomotive is working in the good scenery of the port. These SY use powder coal. Therefore we could not observe black smoke and a lot of coal cinders fell after the SY passed by. I believe you can take good photo shots of the SY in such a nice view of the port. And it is quite easy access from anywhere in Chongqing.

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