A brief glimpse of secretive Myanmar

Were trains to blame for the travel writing boom of the 1980s? When Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar was published in 1975, it sold 1.5 million copies and launched a publishing phenomenon. At first, long-distance train journeys conjured all the romance of the golden age of travel: leather luggage, first-class compartments and the billowing steam from an antique engine. But with each new imitator, the format became increasingly stale, and now train trips suggest the cushioned charm of Michael Portillo’s never-ending BBC series. Nevertheless, as Clare Hammond shows in On the Shadow Tracks, rail journeys can still take the traveller deep inside a country.

The author worked as a journalist in Myanmar during the period of relative openness after the 2015 election, when the military junta was replaced by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy. Though the army remained a powerful presence, journalists enjoyed new freedoms to travel and report. Hammond lived near Yangon Central Railway Station and assumed that all the country’s railways dated back to the colonial era until she learnt about a network of semi-secret tracks constructed under the military dictatorship, which traversed many of the conflict-torn corners of Myanmar. She grew curious about these unofficial lines, and why they were kept hidden, so began visiting the ghost stations and tracks that made up this obscure network.

Her journey takes her from Dawei in the tropical south of the country to Kachin state on the mountainous northern border, from a disused mine in the Northern Shan to the dense forests beyond Inle Lake. Along the way she faces bureaucratic obstacles, police chaperones and military blockades, not to mention unreliable maps and inconsistent timetables. Her trains leave late and break down; the carriages are dilapidated; the tracks are flooded, or buried, or blown up, or reclaimed by the spreading jungle.