Pingdingshan Pictures
September 2002
All photographs © Copyright Duncan Cotterill 2002. All rights reserved.
The mine railway's depot, east
of Shenxi yard, has a well equipped workshop where full overhauls, including
boiler work can be carried out.
The west end of Shenxi Yard
can be a very busy place. Long trains of empties are brought in from the CNR
interchange at Pingdingshan Dong, split into shorter rakes and taken to individual
collieries. The best times for departures at the west end of the yard are
after the shift change at 08:00 and after the lunch break. Talking of lunch,
we found an excellent noodle shop close to the level crossing at the west
end of the yard.
Big smoke is rare from Pingdingshan's
engines, which run with clean stacks most of the time, but it does make more
dramatic pictures. This pollution will soon clear, unlike that from the thousands
of vehicles which clog Pingdingshan's busy roads day and night.
QJs look quite different without
their smoke deflectors, more closely resembling their Russian LV class ancestors.
QJ 7186 was the penultimate member of the class built for service on the national
railway in 1987, although it may have gone straight into industrial use. A
final batch of 20 QJ were built for industrial service before steam production
finally ended at Datong late in 1988.
The mine loading points make
excellent backdrops for photography, providing an appropriate context for
pictures of coal trains. Most mines use a rope haulage system for moving wagons
through the loading point. The rope pulls a trolley along the inner set of
rails of the right hand track. The trolley pushes against the knuckle coupler
of the the rearmost wagon, moving the whole rake under the loader as required.