Okey dokes! Well, here goes...
To passionate followers of steam, the Jing Peng Pass in China's Inner Mongolia was something of an historical miracle. In the 1990s, when the rest of the world had largely finished with steam (setting aside little pockets at the time, like Cuba's sugar railways and North Korea), China decided to build a massive new railway - primarily to transport coal - and operate it with steam. Think about that! It's approaching the 21st century, and there's a new, long distance railway line operated exclusively with giants of steam! And not just any railway. Mountains. Great plains. Huge expanses of dramatic countryside. Winter temperatures so cold it would punch the air out of your lungs. I once saw a videographer up there with part of his face missing because he'd shot a long sequence and his camera had frozen to his face. The only place I have ever gone where a steam train would pass you and, within moments, the water that had seconds before been superheated steam would fall around you as fresh crystals of ice with a scattered, soft noise half padding, half tinkling. The only place I've ever been where teary eyes would start to freeze shut and nostril hairs would crunch if you wiped your nose. Where the time you needed to worry about your toes was when they stopped hurting.
It was truly a wonderful, harsh, bleak, awe-inspiring place.
But this crazy new heaven of steam was to be short-lived. By the winter of 2004/5, we all knew that this would be the last winter of steam and diesels' global march of tedious dominance would come here too.
So, I did one last trip back to experience it one last time.
Which brings me to this specific picture. Why is it that the best pictures always have some special, particular factors designed by malicious fate to make them the hardest to get? This location is known as Tunnel 4, after the tunnel from which you can see the train emerging. To get to the position, you have to scramble up a mountainside. When you get there, you realise that in the winter, the sun starts the day behind the hills and it's in shadow. About 30 minutes after it pops over the hill, it has moved to a position where the light angle is all wrong, and there's no decent light on the side of the train. 30 minutes a day with the light right, and that's it. But these trains don't run to a timetable - these are freights and they run as needed at different times each day. So you try to work out if a train is approaching in the right window, and go for it if you fancy your chances. Thing is - there were lots of wonderful vantage points that were easy to do, near the road; you could chase the train and blaze off loads of them. Or you could climb up here - which takes time - and try just for this. You really had to want it, and hope nothing would go wrong.
Which brings me to the biggest problem. The prevailing wind. It's from the west here which puts it directly at odds with that 30-minute window of morning light. If the wind blows from the west, the steam would blow down and hide the train in white mess. The picture would be ruined. My friends and I had tried this shot quite a few times and always - always - something had gone wrong. We would sacrifice all those easy shots near the road, several per train, try this, and get nothing. The train would come too soon and be in shadow. Or too late and be lit from behind. Or the light would be perfect but the steam would blow down. Or a cloud would hide the sunlight entirely. Something. Every. Single. Infuriating. Time.
In fact, we'd had our last go at it. If we were to see all the other places on our trip, we had to wave goodbye to the Jing Peng Pass for the last time. There would be no further visits after the steam had finished. We'd valiantly tried, and failed.
BUT THEN
My friend Ian's knee asserted itself.
We were sharing a room and one evening, I heard a clatter then an agonised roar. I rushed into our en suite bathroom and found that water had found its way down the back of the bath and onto the floor, turning it as slippery as an ice rink. As Ian got out of the bath, it tipped (not fixed very well in these rural places) and he was propelled onto the treacherous floor. He lost control, twisted and dislocated his kneecap. Imagine the poor chap's predicament. Several days' drive away from civilisation, in a rural location, with a dislocated knee. We got help. A local doctor came, by which time he had put the knee back himself. The doc gave him drugs unknown to western science that - shall we say - stopped him caring about the pain. We had to get the village carpenter to knock up some crutches for him, for the day when he could move (which would not be that day or the day after). Any crutches in the area - if there were any - had not been built for a man over 6 foot tall.
So the poor guy had to spend some time in bed until the pain/swelling/drugs wore off enough for him to be moved. There was nothing for it - we had to have a couple of extra days on the Jing Peng Pass.
And so it was that we had one last try at Tunnel 4. I persuaded the group to do it rather than go for lots of those easy shots. The gamble was on me... Quite a responsibility, as we all knew it was sacrificing many other shots. As we climbed up the hill, one last time, it was all in shadow. Not only from the hills, but from a bank of cloud - while the other side of the valley, where we might have gone, was bathed in light. We saw a train approaching miles away, perhaps half an hour off. It still seemed hopeless. Can you believe that as the sun rose over the hills, the cloud sank too? It was still there, but the sun rested just over the cloud - just high enough to light the scene. The train stormed out of the tunnel, just as the wind dropped, and - miracle of miracles - the steam stayed up! We had done it! On a day when we should have been driving back home, we had nailed Tunnel 4! On the last day when we could ever have tried it before steam finished there. Somehow, the efforts had paid off.
But not for poor Ian. At the bottom of the valley, in a bed, he was lying there resting his knee slightly deliriously. I suppose he was never going to get the shot. If he had been well enough to have joined us, we wouldn't have been there, but off home anyway. So it wasn't his fate. But i do feel for him and did at the time, even as we stood on the windswept mountainside, hundreds of miles from anything really, whooping and jumping and punching the air and hugging each other that we had achieved the shot of a lifetime.
And that's the story of the shot!
I did warn you it was a digression...
I call it The Ballad of Ian's Knee.
