How to Ride a Bamboo Train

Riding this train has perks

Once upon a time, a friend from college sent me a link about Cambodia’s dying phenomenon of the bamboo train. He wanted to know if I’d seen them. My interest in bamboo trains went from zero to a million in the time it took to read the article.

Last week, we had our national retreat and went to Siem Riep in northwest Cambodia. Siem Riep is only five hours from Battambang. Battambang is the only place where bamboo trains are still running. Therefore, the decision to take a five hour bus ride with terrible Chinese movies from 1984 dubbed over in Khmer was easy.

The French were in Cambodia for 90 years (officially) from 1863-1953. They built two main railway lines, one from Phnom Penh to the Campong Saoum port (or Shanoukville) and another from Phnom Penh to the Thai border via Battambang (Battambang at the time was the second largest city in Cambodia). The railway system fell into decay after independence, especially during the Khmer Rouge Era and Vietnamese occupation. (Incidentally, the KR made the railway operators train young uneducated farm boys how to run the trains, after which they killed the railway operators.) The Phnom Penh Campong Saoum line is currently under restoration. The line going through Battambang is not.

The “nori” has died from use, mostly because the moto (with its own attached flatbed) is the new means to move goods. The ones in Battambang are primarily for tourists coming through. You can ride for seven kilometers along the warped train rails before turning around and coming back to the original station. It’s a slightly terrifying ride; flying along at a pretty brisk speed on a home-make train car on rails over 150 years old that have probably never been repaired.

Over time though, Cambodians decided to innovate a way to use tracks. They built flatbed “cars” out of bamboo with moto-sized engines on the back to move goods along the line for strictly local use. Each car is free-standing, they aren’t connected and an individual engine powers each car. The cars are completely collapsible in that two people can take it off the tracks in less than a minute (with no cargo). This is mandatory because there’s no system to coordinate the trains. Every time two cars meet on the track, there’s a friendly debate about who is going to get off the tracks.

Totally worth the $5. Even worth that bus ride. The icing on the cake was getting completely drenched coming back on the train. It’s not supposed to rain in March, ever.