TOP: Silhouetted against the rising sun, an unknown JS 2-8-2 leads a loaded coal train from Erjing Mine to South Station, where it will be transferred to China Railways. ABOVE: Hotbox! One of the spoil wagon axle boxes has caught fire as another empty spoil train pushes out of the yard at Ping’An Coal Mine on the Fuxin Mining Administration Railway on a cold afternoon in February 2016. OPPOSITE: Pingzhuang Mining Railway SY 1441 strug- gles to pull 50 empty coal cars out of the mainline interchange at Pingzhuang Nan Zhan (Pingzhuang South Station). As it crosses the river, this train will slowly gather the speed needed for the 1.5 percent grade ahead.
investments, so it purchased second- hand diesels from China Rail. These diesels are older than some of the SY 2-8-2s they were meant to replace, and with fragility and age, combined with a workshop accustomed to steam, the situation is one where the diesels are not reliable. Therefore, the Pingzhuang Mining Railway has continued to overhaul the SY 2-8-2s and kept four locomotives serviceable, with one or two in use daily. The Pingzhuang Mining Railway
exists as branchline from the China Rail mainline. The Mining Railway runs five miles uphill from the mainline, crosses a river, and passes the locomotive shops
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before reaching ZhuangMei Station, the heart of the railway operations. Here a short branch heads uphill to a small mine, while the mining railway mainline continues for another ten miles and serves three more mines along the single-track route. The mining railway runs through rural villages and farming areas between the mines, making it a very photogenic system.
How to get to Pingzhuang
Pingzhuang is an hour’s drive from Chifeng, a large city in Inner Mongolia. From Chifeng, there are daily 45-minute flights to Beijing, or several nightly comfortable sleeper trains. Once in
Pingzhuang, the Baoshan Hotel on BaoShan Road is a great place to stay and the hotel management will coordinate a taxi for train chasing. Getting around Pingzhuang requires a good local map; I always print out the Google maps of the city. The single-track nature of this mine railway makes it very easy to chase trains by taxi. The rural setting of the line, combined with the joy of chasing branchline steam in 2016, makes a visit to Pingzhuang very rewarding.
Additional Steam Locations No survey of Chinese steam can
be complete without mentioning the narrow gauge Shibanxi Railway located
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