This May Top Them All - A Train Wreck ... ?

Today we got in a train wreck.  As far as travel stories go, it’s going to be hard to top this ...

Are you kidding me?  A train wreck?   Pretty much ... it was certainly close enough for me.  We've had some adventures, but this may take the cake

Read on for details - 

We decided to take the train from Mandalay to Rangoon.  We’ve been in Burma/Myanmar for several days now, and it was time to make our way to next stop, the capital city of Rangoon, which they now call Yangon (why do they keep changing the names of these places?)  

Being ready for some travel adventure we took the train, which left at 6:00 in the morning.  It had been a considerable hassle to get tickets, and the ride was going to be really long (twelve hours?) but we didn’t realize just how exciting it would turn out. 

We paid the upcharge to get “Upper Class” seats, which means "first class" by their not-very-high standards.  We paid a whopping equivalent of $7.52 each, and the train took off right on time, which we found surprising to the point of amazing, as the Burmese people are pretty laid back. (it certainly didn't arrive on time)  

Interesting note:  We could have actually paid in American dollars, it's the co-official currency here along with the Burmese Kyat. 

Even leaving at that early hour, it was hot and muggy.  It’s extremely humid here and the temperature has been in the high 90’s (reaching 100 degrees yesterday).  We loaded all our stuff; not a lot compared to many travelers, except we had a bunch of food and water for the trip.  

The train was really basic and was not air conditioned, a fact we knew in advance.  So we were prepared to be sweat the whole way - and we did, we were drenched in sweat all day long.  The only saving grace was the open windows and the small rotating ceiling fans.  The train was loud and rickety and very bumpy and didn’t go terribly fast, at least in the beginning. 

About 4:00 in the afternoon, the train began to speed up and go faster, and as a result we started bouncing around like crazy.  It also got really loud, with banging and noise and lurching from side to side.  It seemed like we were going too fast, and it was so bad you all you could do was hold on.  It was super loud, banging and clanging, and you had to shout to talk to anyone.  It was wild, but the Burmese seemed to take it in stride.  I captured some video of the action but was unable to upload it to the blog. 

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Not sure why they decided to speed up, but it got pretty crazy. I began to wonder whether the train was going to fly off the tracks, it was pretty radical.  It seemed real dangerous ...  

The train was not very stable in the first place, and now it was super bouncy rocking back and forth.   These trains here are old and funky and they run on narrow gauge tracks that are neither smooth or flat.

All of a sudden we heard a bang and the train came to a screeching halt, kind of in the middle of nowhere.  We looked around - no train station in sight, why did we stop here?   We were in the jungle near a small village.  Everyone looked at each other - what’s going on?

My son Lewis looked outside and saw a bunch of train employees running to the back and shouting.  Upon further investigation he declares:  “Whoa,” he said, “looks like we lost some cars off the train!”

Turns out the train had broken in half and come apart!  It separated in the middle and there were rail cars left up the track behind us!  This is nuts!  Apparently a very large hydraulic hose had busted while the train was careening down the track and the coupler hitch broke loose.  This left the fine folks in the back three cars rolling on their own down the track as we sped on!   

This is like what you would see in a movie or something.  It was scary and kind of funny at the same time.  Soon everyone started running out of the nearby village to see what was going on. Everyone was shouting.  It's a good thing we weren't going downhill, or around a big curve. 

People started getting off the train to have a look.  “we’re gonna be here a long time ...”  we realized.

Nobody seemed to know what to do, and they started walking down the tracks looking for parts and pieces of the train.  I wondered if we were even going to be able to continue.  Train guys started arguing with each other and pointing here and there.  Somebody walked up with a pair of pliers!  HA! HA! HA! Pliers?  We're going to need more than that. 

To make a long story short, they eventually decided to hook up the lost cars with a mechanical coupler, no hydraulic hose or anything, no brakes, and just pull them down the track behind us.  Kind of like pulling a boat behind your pickup truck.  Except this is the National Railroad and there are probably a hundred passengers back there, a very unsafe solution, even downright treacherous.    

At least they slowed down from that point on, and became a lot more careful.  Frankly, there were still people back in those last cars, wouldn’t you want to unload them into the functioning part of the train?   But they just put the thing in low gear and pressed on, we had a long way to go.  This whole thing made a long trip even longer.  

At least Lewis was able to have some fun hanging out the side of the train ...

I figured we still had a couple hundred miles to go, and we were crawling along at twenty miles an hour.  You can do the math, maybe ten more hours?  Good Grief!

Turns out that the entire trip took eighteen hours ... I though twelve hours sounded long, but eighteen?  Unreal.  To make matter worse, the sun went down and the bugs started coming out the jungle into the train car and eating us.  We still had the windows open because it was so freakin' hot.  What a miserable time ...  but it made for a good sunset picture!

   
This has to be in the top five of our travel adventures ... or rather ... misadventures.  This is the kind of thing you can tell the grandkids.