(Agence France Presse distributed the following article on September 26.)
WOLSZTYN, Poland — Train lovers from around the world are flocking to this small town in western Poland in their passion to admire, stoke up and drive the last steam engines in regular service in Europe.
Simon, an English man living in South Africa, is one of some 250 train-tourists, many from Britain, but also from Germany, US, Canada, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, France and Japan who make the trip here every year to take a course in stoking up and driving steam engines.
He trembles with excitement as he waits on the platform, itself shaken by the movement of the locomotive.
At the signal from the driver he plunges a heavy shovel into a heap of coal and and in one go spreads it into the chasm.
Chug chug, as the train gathers up steam, then a shrill whistle pierces the air, and it’s off.
The drivers screw down the valves and attentively check the pressure gauge.
The courses are run by the Wolsztyn Experience company, owned by 50-year-old Briton Howard Jones. In 1996 he persuaded the Polish railway authorities to allow foreign tourists to drive the steam engines, under the surveillance of local drivers.
After getting the go-ahead he signed a contract with the Polish railways PKP and it was full steam ahead.
Simon loads four shovels of coal onto the train every five minutes, the amount needed to maintain the pressure.
The “Beautiful Helen”, an award-winning 1937 Polish-made steam engine, sets off in the direction of the port of Gdansk.
During its six-hour, 300 kilometre (185 mile) journey towards the Baltic coast, the steam engine will use up 17 tonnes of coal to drag eight wagons full of train lovers.
“At the moment we are driving at 80 kilometres (50 miles) an hour,” explained Mike, his nose stuck to the window since the beginning of the journey, a stopwatch and pen in his hand. He notes down the number of kilometres travelled by counting posts.
The steam engines do not have a speedometer and only experienced drivers know how to measure the speed from the noise the train makes.
Two men are leaning out of the window, with the steam, soot and wind stinging their eyes and whipping their faces.
“In England there is a special kind of train nut: people who sniff in the smoke,” explains Krzysztof Chrzan, the Polish representative of Wolsztyn Experience.
Neville, a former insurance worker in Derby in northern England, is not sitting at the train’s controls, saying his wife “does not like it very much”.
He gets his kick from taking phorographs of the old trains.
The depot in Wolsztyn, which has been working under the same rules for nearly a century, houses around 30 locomotives of 13 different kinds, from the oldest, the Tki3-87 dating back to 1908, up to the Ok1-359 which featured in Roman Polanski’s film the Pianist.
In Soviet times, Wolsztyn was an important Soviet military transport base, with steam engines considered a strategic tool in the event that oil ran out.
Even today, Wolsztyn is not a museum with squeaky-clean machines and railway men dressed up for tourists. Everything here is for real.
Lesley, a 39-year-old English woman living in the South of London who works as an inspector of railway accidents, says she is not afraid aboard this train. She has been here some 40 times in summer or winter.
With a Polish railways PKP cap perched on her head, she prepares to take her turn. At the next station the locomotive is hers. She will get off exhausted, deafened by the noise and black with soot. But happy.
“We are mad”, she says.