The West Sumatran system in 1974

When we put into the West Sumatran port of Teluk Bayur, we stayed for one whole week, loading all kinds of tropical produce. The ship smelt of coffee, tea, tobacco, rubber and spices, and once I remember climbing down into a lower hold entirely clad in palm leave matting to protect the vulnerable tobacco cargo. In the hold the sun slanted down on to the swirling dust and the glistening brown backs of the Sumatran workers stowing the tobacco bales into place. It was as if John Company's days had returned: perhaps it is a good thing it was just an illusion...

Right behind the warehouses was a station where twice daily a C33 class 2-6-0T would come in with a goods train, fuss around for one or two hours and then depart into the opposite direction towards the town of Padang. Traffic was quite busy on account of several ships loading there at the same time. It was not long before I boarded a steam loco with two bottles of beer for the crew, and asked if I could come along for the ride. No problem! Working a steam loco in the Tropics is a very thirsty job, so the smiling crew welcomed the beer and despite a formidable language barrier we got along well. The footplate was ankle deep in coal and very dirty, and the loco was rather dilapidated.

There were two locos assigned to the harbour job, one with reduced pressure due to the boiler's age, and the other in a somewhat better condition. These Kessler-built locos, despite being quite ugly, had beautiful outside Allan scissors motion with two eccentrics mounted on a return crank on the driving crankpin. Similar locos once worked in Portugal.

Remains of the Emmahaven bunkering station

One free afternoon I walked a distance along the line towards a huge deserted coal storage complex which boasted tracks on two levels and a bridge towards a high-level loader over the harbour. Here traces could be found of formerly busy traffic in coal mined in the interior, with a shunting neck right at the end of a low level bay, deserted hopper wagons and a long line of stationary coal bunkers on both sides of the overgrown area. I remember walking along the rusting track, keeping a watchful eye for snakes wherever I went.

Only very recently I found out where all that coal must have come from. On inspecting a recently published atlas of old town maps in the former Dutch East Indies details can be found of the course of the railway through Padang and into the Anai gorge to Padangpanjang in the Padang Uplands. Here is a junction: the left hand line continues to Bukittinggi (a former hill resort similar in function to Darjeeling in India), the right-hand branch continues past the Singkarak lake (an old crater lake) to Solok, the mining town of Sawahlunto, a hundred miles into the interior, and Muara, the terminus.

The map of Sawahlunto shows numerous collieries which according to the atlas produced about a third of the coal mined in the former Dutch East Indies in what was called the 'Umbilin Coal Field'. There was a big screening house and shunting yard, an aerial ropeway, a 'Decauville railway', the mining company's offices and even the mine officers' club. A prison was conveniently nearby across the railway, which makes one wonder at its relationship to the collieries! All of the coal must have passed through the installation I visited.

Quite recently I found a 1929 film showing Teluk Bayur or Emmahaven as it was known then, with the coal loading bridge in place even then and a distant train running along the shore. It appears that Emmahaven was a pre-war marine coal bunkering station. At the time I visited the installation it was a little dilapidated, but despite its decades-long disuse (coal-fired ships have disappeared shortly after the war) it looked as if it had been abandoned yesterday...

I have since tried to figure out how the plant was supposed to operate. It seems that coal was stored there ready for loading into ships, being discharged into the bunkers from the upper level. When a ship came in, the coal was probably dropped into hopper wagons below which were then pushed on to the loader over the ship's hold. The strangest thing was the track right inside the bunker structure where a few derelict mine type hoppers could be found, without a mine in sight. I expect these were used to work the loader.

Pakan Baru

Looking at the map I drew up, one period that should never be forgotten was when the Japanese military, during their wartime occupation of Sumatra, saw fit to build a primitive extension from the Padang system through the jungle to Pakan Baru on the northeast coast. During 1944 and 1945, the Japanese used slave labour and Allied prisoners of war, including interned merchant seamen, to build this railway under the most inhumane conditions conceivable. Ironically at a great cost of lives, the Japanese declared the extension completed on the day the war ended and it never saw one train running.