A colonial-era railway that was once the lifeblood of Indonesia’s Aceh could paradoxically be revived in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami, which obliterated the coastline of the province.
Built in 1876 by the Dutch, the 600km single-gauge railway in the north of Sumatra island, linking the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, to the city of Medan, sank into oblivion a century later amid unrest.
The railway reached its zenith just before World War II, when up to 9 000 people used it daily, transporting about 500 tons of goods to and from the staunchly Muslim area.
Steam trains plying the unique and narrow track along the scenic north-east coast of Aceh remained in use until the mid-1970s when a bloody separatist conflict began that lasted until last year, leaving Aceh in isolation.
Metre by metre, the unused rails were overgrown by expanding paddy fields or subsumed by towns, while stations were gradually converted or neglected. Some sections of the track were smothered with asphalt and used as narrow roads.
In 2004, Indonesia asked the French railway operator SNCF to conduct a feasibility study on restoring the line. The company agreed on December 20 — six days before the tsunami that killed about 168 000 people in Aceh alone.
Shocked by the scale of the catastrophe, SNCF’s then chief executive Louis Gallois offered to undertake the study free of charge and experts were appointed to get to work in May last year. They travelled to a devastated Aceh and worked in damaged cities such as Banda Aceh, Sigli, Bireuen and Lhokseumawe.
”We were still able to find technicians and engineers who were involved with the train,” Michel Antraigue, an adviser to SNCF International in Indonesia, said.
The French workers traced the tracks, which sometimes disappeared under houses or thick vegetation, and checked the state of the slowly corroding metal bridges constructed for the railway.
Numerous local officials told them of their desire to see the return of the train.
Their work was documented by filmmakers commissioned by SNCF who created Travelogues of Sumatra, which scored a prize last month in Paris at a film festival focusing on construction and the environment.
In their report, the engineers concluded that a resumption of rail traffic is possible if substantial work is carried out, such as widening the gauge from 70cm to 1,435m.
”Everything needs tidying up as far as the route is concerned,” Eric Dussiot, an SNCF architect, says in the film.
The railway was built for trains expected to move at a maximum speed of 80kph, but the French have recommended making it suited to trains travelling 50% faster.
Special measures will need to be taken in highly populated areas, where the train driver once used to simply honk a horn to warn of the train’s approach.
”The French railroad employees worked hand in hand with their colleagues from the Indonesian railroads” to carry out the study, said Jean-Pierre Loubinoux, chairperson of SNCF International. ”We deeply hope that this project becomes a reality.”
The ball is now in the court of the government in Jakarta, which sees the rail link as a way of strengthening ties between the formerly restive province and the rest of the Indonesian archipelago.
The Aceh Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Agency, which coordinates rebuilding projects in tsunami-hit areas, has listed the restoration of the railway among its planned major projects.
”The tsunami allows us to mobilise a certain amount of capital,” said adviser Antraigue.
Trains will be useful to rebuilding efforts in the region, where the destruction of infrastructure has made it difficult to bring in reconstruction materials, he added. — AFP
