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 tracks are flooded, or buried, or blown up, or reclaimed by the spreading jungle
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. But she pushes on with impressive determination.
She also travels back in time through Myanmar’s recent history. The British built most of the railway network for the dual purposes of military conquest and economic exploitation, and she writes well about this little-known chapter in the country’s occupation. Trains were a vital part of the infrastructure, required to extract the plentiful natural resources:
Tramways carried logs through the teak forests in the country’s heartland and in the north. Narrow-gauge railways shifted limestone to new cement works, and light railways were laid beside onshore oilfields, alongside pipelines carrying crude. Locomotives were used everywhere, from new tin and tungsten mines to new rubber and sugar estates. From the far corners of the country, vast quantities of timber and minerals were ferried by train alone, with a rich array of other resources, to the crowded dockyards of Rangoon.
Before the British conquest, Myanmar was a collection of kingdoms and principalities separated by mountain ranges. Despite vague promises of self-determination during the second world war, after the British left the region these diverse ethnic and religious states were yoked together into a single country. Ever since, insurgent groups have fought back against the Burmese majority.
For Hammond, there are clear parallels between imperial rule and the later dictatorship. Although these overlaps are suggestive, the book lacks enough historical material to make the case that the military borrowed their methods from colonial administrators. Likewise, it’s not obvious that the junta’s authoritarian techniques were so different from those adopted by the military government in neighbouring Thailand, or the communist dictatorships in Laos and Cambodia.
Nonetheless, the book gives a damning account of the army officers and politicians in charge during recent decades. The people Hammond meets share countless stories of corruption and abuse, not to mention experiences of imprisonment, detention, forced labour, confiscated property and the suppression of basic freedoms. At times the landscape is the most eloquent witness, such as when Hammond wanders the abandoned hotels and museums of the military-built new capital Naypyidaw – ‘surrounded by nothing but concrete and scrubland… as if I was stuck in an unsettling dream’ – or the war-damaged landscapes of the central Shan: ‘Parched fields that were bordered by clusters of charred trees’ and ‘women in the fields, with ashen faces and torn clothes’.
At the start of these journeys, Hammond shared the belief that the 2015 election marked a new start for Myanmar. By the end she realised how extensive the remaining military presence in the country was. The difficulties she faced during her trips were not simply the result of shoddy infrastructure, but the deliberate effort to keep areas inaccessible and communities cut off. So the ‘tracks’ of the title are a shadow of the past and the future too, anticipating the 2021 coup that would return the country to army rule. Given the civil war now shattering Myanmar, it’s hard to say whether this courageous journey will ever be possible again.
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