Salman Rashid
From Bostan, a short way north of Quetta, the railway line stretches a full 320 km in a northeasterly direction through the picturesque valley of the Zhob River. By this relation, when the government laid it out in the 1920s, it was called the Zhob Valley Railway (ZVR). Because railway engineers of the time envisioned it penetrating through the narrow defiles -- so rugged that at that time they were deemed hard to be traversed by broad gauge locomotives -- between the Shinghar Mountains and the main massif of the Suleman Range to reach Dera Ismail Khan, they laid out the tiny narrow gauge.
Simultaneously, the line was also to penetrate across to the two Waziristans and eventually connect with Bannu. The narrow gauge connection between Bannu and Mari Indus, whence the broad gauge line went up to Cambellpur (Attock), would thus have made this the shortest connection between Quetta and Peshawar or Rawalpindi. But in the late 1920s, other imperatives came up followed by the onset of the World War. ZVR therefore never went beyond Fort Sandeman, as Zhob had been renamed by the Raj to commemorate one of its finest officers.
Now, time was when North Western Railway, the predecessor of today's Pakistan Railway, operated three different gauges of line. The broad gauge (5 feet, 6 inches) was the favoured gauge connecting most railway destinations. There was a metre gauge (3 feet, 3 inches) that operated in parts of Thar Desert in Sindh and there was the even smaller narrow gauge (2 feet, 6 inches) that ran in parts of Pukhtunkhwa and Balochistan. The ZVR connection between Bostan and Zhob town, a narrow gauge line, was the longest in this gauge in the subcontinent, perhaps also in the entire world.
I first travelled along this line in the autumn of 1993. At that time the line had been dead for about six years, the last passenger train having run early in 1985. For a year thereafter, freight trains continued to haul chrome ore mined near the town of Muslimbagh. But faster road transport that loaded at the mines and unloaded at Pakistan Steel Mills in Karachi, won over the tedium of hauling the ore by lorry to Muslimbagh, transporting it by narrow gauge train to Quetta and then trans-shipping it to broad gauge for Karachi.
And so sometime early in 1986, the last ore train pulled into the Bostan siding, off-loaded its chrome hoppers and shunted the empty rolling stock to the siding by the loco shed where I found them in 1993. The locomotive was run to Bostan under the tin roof of the shed and when it dropped fire that was the last time steam coursed through its flues -- at least with the purpose of hauling a train. An era had come to an end.
But many in the railway did not believe that to be true. Finding me pottering about the loco shed, I was accosted by a man who introduced himself as, if memory serves, Tahir. He said he was the Station Master at Bostan. Tahir remembered the glory days of ZVR. We talked for a long time and he seemed to believe that sooner or later the line will run again.
For some years after the closure, he said, the three locomotives in the shed had been fired once every week to keep their boilers in good fettle. But then funds became scarce and the test firing stopped, nevertheless he knew that the engines were in working order. That was in November 1993 -- seven years since the line had last operated.
I drove on. With the sun dipping behind the western hills, Muslimbagh had so romantic an aura that my body erupted in goose bumps. The dramatic autumnal light, the deserted station building and the forlorn chrome hoppers sitting on the siding like some dumpy animals unknown to science came from another world. Near the loco shed was a curious piece of machinery that turned out to be meant for unfreezing furnace oil – a reminder of the harshness of winter in the Zhob Valley.
There was also a rail-mounted coal crane that had not been in use since the time the locomotives were retro-fitted to take furnace oil instead of coal. The most interesting feature on this crane was a plaque that read, 'The Great Indian Peninsular Railway'. It had come a long way; a very long way indeed. Since it was rail-mounted, it showed that somewhere on the GIPR there was at sometime a narrow gauge line. When that was converted to broad gauge, the crane found its new home at Muslimbagh. But that was before partition; that was in another country.
Kan Mehtarzai railway station was a dream. At 2222 metres above the sea, it was the highest railway station in Pakistan. I had at that time written that this was also the highest in the subcontinent, but have since learned that that honour is kept by Ghoom station on the Darjeeling line. That line, incidentally, is Decauville gauge, that is, just two feet wide.
In Bostan, Tahir had told me of the time in 1971 at the height of a very severe winter when a train had become snow-bound near Kan Mehtarzai. After struggling to free the train for a couple of hours, the driver dropped fire to wait for a rescue locomotive. The rescuer from Bostan did not fare very well either: the snow lay thick just below the station and it wedged itself hard into the drifts. That was old-style journeying and high adventure.
In February 2005, on my way back to Quetta from the Torghar Mountains of Qila Saifullah, I stopped at Kan Mehtarzai to get a taste of that long-ago adventure. After eight years of severe drought this was the first winter of good snowfall. At nine in the morning, Kan Mehtarzai was one railway station to die for. Icicles festooned its shaded eaves above deep snowdrifts and snow draped the pitched roof. The platform was carpeted with untrodden white and on the track sat three forlorn covered wagons, the snow reaching half up their wheels.
Beyond Kan Mehtarzai, the countryside belonged to the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone: wide-open valley with scarcely a sign of human intervention hemmed in by dark, brooding hills. As I stood on the deserted platform of one railway station near a distance marker reading '208' (kilometres to Zhob), shot full of holes, the gusting wind sent clumps of Amaranthus bushes tumbling past and I half expected to see Clint Eastwood come galloping in.
Most of the railway stations on this line were mud-plastered brick buildings with a unique octagonal turret-like structure serving as the ticket window. Such an architectural feature I have not seen on any other line in Pakistan. Qila Saifullah with its blockhouse of a railway station had another very picturesque building: the residence of the Assistant Engineer. It was ramshackle and uncared for because the Permanent Way Inspector (PWI) whose home it then was, was a charlatan not interested in his duties. He was making a pretty packet on the side administering to the superstitions of an illiterate population. Even so this fraud hoped to soon be promoted to Assistant Engineer (AEN). I now hear that he has indeed been promoted and is not serving the railway somewhere in Punjab. Deadwood that we so carefully nurture shall forever remain deadwood.
At Zhob, the last railway station, the façade still bore the name Fort Sandeman and the end of the line was marked by a pair of stout timbers stuck upright to prevent locomotives from rolling over. The station building had been taken over by several families of Afghan refugees.
Three or four years after this first trip, I returned to Bostan. In the loco shed I found to my great surprise three absolutely prim-looking narrow gauge steam locomotives. The stationmaster (no longer Tahir) told me that Yaqub Nasir the railways minister, a native of the Zhob Valley, had resolved to get this line up and running again. In anticipation he had got the three locomotives overhauled at the Mughalpura workshop in Lahore. But even in 1993, I had seen that at level crossings the track had been tarmacked over when the road was carpeted. However, the stationmaster was convinced that if the minister wanted it, he would get his way and the line would one day run again.
I left with the hope that Yaqub Nasir would make that dream come true. But the 1990s were a period of uncertain governments and not long afterwards, the government went under taking Nasir with him. That was the end of the ZVR.
On a recent visit to a village near Khanozai (a ZVR railway station), I learned that the line had been auctioned and uprooted. A quick trip up to Zhob showed that to be heart-breakingly true. At Muslimbagh, Qila Saifullah and Zhob the station buildings were in the possession of squatters. The oil melting furnace and the coal crane from Muslimbagh were gone. So were the chrome ore hoppers. The only memory of the over 300 kilometres of track was the slightly raised rail bed discernible in bits along the route. Only at Bostan was a bunch of passenger wagons still parked as a last reminder of the narrow gauge ZVR.
In India the narrow gauge Kalka-Simla line operates to this day. And so does the Darjeeling train. And this is just to mention two. Since partition Indian railway authorities have laid several thousand kilometres of new railway lines. In contrast we in Pakistan have closed line after line after line. We have lost the metre gauge Mirpur Khas-Jhuddo-Mirpur Khas loop and the narrow gauge Nawabshah-Mirpur Khas stretch in Sindh. In Pukhtunkhwa we have obliterated the Bannu-Mari Indus and Tank-Mari Indus as well as the Kohat-Thul line. All three were narrow gauge. And in Balochistan ZVR has been laid low.
Other than the upgrading to broad gauge of the Mirpur Khas-Chor line, we have not laid a single inch of new track. Shamefully enough it is only now, a full 62 years after independence that we struggle to double track our main railway artery between Karachi and Peshawar. And you can just forget about the up-grading of branch lines.
As for the ZVR, if there was ever an open air railway museum, it was this line. Auctioning the steel fixtures was all right to bolster a cash-strapped railway, but ruinous bridges festooned with a stretch of line could have remained. Or those features called 'dip' where no bridge spanned a shallow stream and the line dipped into the bed. The AEN's bungalow at Qila Saifullah with its unique architecture could have been saved, but its current dilapidation forewarns of an early demise. Shame on us, shame on Pakistan Railway.
The new pipe dream which I heard in Quetta was about the building of a broad gauge line in lieu of the old narrow gauge ZVR. This line, it is said, will connect with Dera Ismail Khan. Going by the record of our national railway, it is doubtful if this scheme will ever see the light of day. Meanwhile, by auctioning ZVR Pakistan Railway has destroyed one of its finest heritage pieces. Today only the steel has been removed and smelted; tomorrow the unique and beautiful station buildings will crumble away into the dust. Shame on us, we who are the custodians of our national heritage.
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