The Crossing Was Level, The Playing Field Was Not

Decades ago, a bus journey from Butterworth to Padang Serai (where my aunty lived) would take us through a little town called Tasik Gelugor (‘半路店’ in Chinese, meaning ‘halfway shop’).

There was a gated railway level crossing at the fringe of this town.  For a young boy, the Great Expectation was, hopefully, the bus would arrive in time to witness a train passing. (And many times it happened!)  Wow, what a delight to watch the long string of heavy coaches and metal wagons go rumbling by, preceded by several long puffs of the airhorns from the locomotive! Choo-oo! Choo-oo!

There was a railway worker stationed at the crossing, to manually move the gates into positions to barricade the road traffic whenever a train was due to cross.  Size did matter – and always had the right of way. 

Pulling The Right Levers To Get On The Right Track

Sounds like a Success 101 tagline, right? 

Well, my train of thoughts today was hauled back into the past, with my journeys on the old Keretapi Tanah Melayu. Since young I noticed that at stations, the railway line split into several branch tracks, and so I wondered, “How does the train get on the right one?”

The inquisitive Early Nerdy me led to an interesting discovery that at each station, there was a set of large levers with several colours and a worker yanked at one or more of them, to shift sections of rails for alignment to the intended path of the train.  (Lesson: configuring a one-track mind  for multiple passage ways)

These days, computerized automation has largely supplanted these manually-activated mechanisms.  Nevertheless, some of these vintage lever sets can still be seen at several old KTM stations.

The Railbus That Was No Real Bus

Look, it’s a train, no, it’s a bus….aiya, no lah, it’s a Railbus, haha

In 1987, KTM started operating a fleet of 10 Hungarian-made “railbuses”. Among the routes were :-

1. Kulai/Singapura/Kulai
2. Ipoh/Kuala Lumpur/Ipoh
3. Ipoh/Butterworth/Ipoh
4. Gemas/Mentakab/Gemas
5. Port Klang/KL/Sentul
6. Butterworth/Arau/Butterworth

I remember travelling once in the early 1990s from SGP to Kulai for a work assignment (my company had a factory in Bandar Tenggara).

There were many complaints though….no aircon, trains were wobbly,etc. After a few years these were withdrawn from service.

Has anyone else travelled on one of these railbuses ?

Tunnel Visions @ Bukit Berapit

In the early days, a KTM train jouney on the Butterworth-KL sector took something like 9 gruelling hours with the slow mail train making umpteen stops along the way.

For kids, every trip was an adventure.  The most eagerly anticipated events were the encounters with the 4 tunnels of Bukit Berapit.   Two long and two short ones. (The British were clever not to have made it Three Long and Two Short, 三長兩短). If I remember correctly, the second tunnel south of Taiping was the longest of the four.

With the opening of the new twin-tunnel in conjunction with double tracking and electrification,  these tunnels (and tracks) would probably fade into history or else be reclaimed by the jungle. There are some proposals to preserve them…will there be new light at the ends of these tunnels ?

A Steamy Love Affair

The North Borneo Railways photo here shows the only surviving specimen of an operational steam-engined train in Malaysia.  Brings back fond memories of the days of travelling on KTM trains between Butterworth (from Prai, initially) and Kuala Lumpur in the 1960s.

Those were the days when every trip was filled with great expectations.  I was always peering out of the windows to catch glimpses of the locomotive in front, with black plumes belching from the top, and steam hissing from the sides. Not forgetting the frequent whistling (I believe was also steam-operated).

KTM has come a long way.  Now as more sections of the rail network switch to electric trains, raw steamy love affairs have evolved into more refined electrifying experience (hopefully).   (Well, the intermediate diesel-electric locos were totally boring).

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Before the mid-1960s, the KTM trains were hauled by steam locomotives — huge metallic beasts puffing thick plumes of black smoke from their stacks, and hissing steam from both sides.  The coaches came in three classes, with 3rd Class ones nearest the loco, and 1st Class ones farthest away.

Back then, there was no aircon – hence windows would be down.  We, the poor folks always went for 3rd Class of course.  At the end of a trip from Prai (at that time, the tracks had not been extended to Butterworth yet) to Kuala Lumpur,  our faces would look like as though we had a tour of an  underground coal mine.  A dig with a handkerchief – those days, no one heard of tissues – into the nostrils produced some mighty good carbon black.   Also needed some Eye-Mo drops to clear soot from the eyes.

But it was really fun.  Tooot ! Tooot !