Burma Mines Railway

The Burma Mines Railway is a 2 ft (610 mm) gauge railway in Myanmar for the transportation of locally mined silver and lead ore to a smelter at Namtu.

The line runs from Namyao, on the Mandalay - Lashio branch of Myanmar Railways, via Namtu to Bawdwin and is 80 kilometres (50 mi) long.

History

The Burma Mines, Railway and Smelting Co Ltd was founded in March 1906 and the construction of the railway started in 1907, to reach the Tiger Camp mining area in 1908, with a 5-kilometre (3.1 mi) extension to the Bawdwin mines and[1] included a Z-reverse at Wallah Gorge, just before Tiger Camp, which was later replaced by a spiral.

The railway's headquarters and workshops were built in Namtu.

In 1914 the connection with the metre gauge Burma Railways was moved from Manpwe to Namyao, a short distance to the east. After the First World War, the local Burma Corporation Ltd took over operations and built an electrified underground railway at Tiger Camp and 100 hopper cars were ordered from the American Pressed Steel Car Company.

In the 1930s the line experienced its peak traffic.[2] Steam was largely replaced in the 1970s and 1980s but today two steam locos remain in working order.[3]

Present day

In present day, the coal for the smelters and the finished products is transported by road. Ore transport from Bawdwin to Namtu is still done by rail. The section from Namyao to Namtu sees little traffic. Namtu is a security area and restrictions are placed on visiting the railway, mines and smelters, except on official tours.

gollark: I wonder how long it'll be before someone makes Unicode Turing-complete.
gollark: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5penft/parallelizing_enjarify_in_go_and_rust/dcsgk7n/I think this just wonderfully encapsulates Go.
gollark: Oh, it also has that weird conditional compile thing depending on `_linux.go` suffixes or `_test.go` ones I think?
gollark: Okay, sure, you can ignore that for Go itself, if we had Go-with-an-alternate-compiler-but-identical-language-bits it would be irrelevant.
gollark: I can't easily come up with a *ton* of examples of this, but stuff like generics being special-cased in for three types (because guess what, you *do* actually need them), certain basic operations returning either one or two values depending on how you interact with them, quirks of nil/closed channel operations, the standard library secretly having a `recover` mechanism and using it like exceptions a bit, multiple return values which are not first-class at all and which are used as a horrible, horrible way to do error handling, and all of go assembly, are just inconsistent and odd.

See also
  • Rail transport in Burma

References
  1. The Burma Mines Railway, February 2006
  2. The Burma Mines Railway 1999
  3. The Burma Mines Railway in Namtu
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