Start Of Great Journey

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32032, 5 July 1969, Page 7

Start Of Great Journey

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HONG KONG.

Under a red tower at the edge of Hong Kong’s glittering harbour is the start of one of the world’s greatest train journeys.

It is still possible today to travel by rail from Hong Kong to Europe—by way of Canton and Peking, in China. Moscow, to Paris and Calais.

But luck, a big batch of visas and a great deal of patience would be needed to undertake the journey across Asia and Europe. In practice, only about 10 per cent of the nine million passengers who pass through the ornate brick railway station each year travel more than 22 miles, the distance from the Kowloon harbourside to the border with China.

Today the Kowloon and Canton Railway Company does not even run as far as its name implies. Passengers for Canton have to disembark at the border with China and walk across the wooden brl.dge at Lo Wti to the Chinese train while the I green-painted local train chugs back to Kowloon.

The Hong Kong section of

the railway was built between 1906 and 1910 at the then enormous cost of $160,000, though services on the 111mile route to Canton were started in 1911.

Until the Japanese occupation of Canton in 1938, four passenger trains made the three-hour journey each day. Through services were resumed after World War 11, but since 1949, passenger trains have not been allowed to run direct.

At present nine Australianbuilt diesel engines run 34 trains a day through the colony’s rural new territories area, past rice fields, fishing villages, craggy hills and finally the immaculate greens of the Royal Hong Kong Golf Club only two miles and a half from the border. About ?4,000 people a day use the railway, paying 50 cents for the. hour’s journey from Kowloon to Sheung Shui, the last stop for Hong Kong passengers before Lo Wu station in the restricted border area. On the Chinese festivals of Chung Yung and Ching Ming, traditional time for visiting ancestral graves, more than 100,000 people a day use the trains to visit rural cemetries.

The Canton railway is Hong Kong’s main' link with the mainland and carries about a million tons of goods a year—mostly food imports from 'China.

Work on a new railway terminus in nearby Hungbom began last year and is expected to be completed by 1972. The $6 million project, first planned in 1958, will take the railway further east along the harbourside. The new terminus, being built on 32 acres of reclaimed land, will have a six-platform station, goods yards, marshalling yards, workshops and trans-shipment and storage sidings. In the meantime the station platforms are littered and half-empty, a stark contrast to the bustling cross-harbour passenger ferry terminal outside and the crowded Kowloon streets.

Activity stirs as trains clank in and out at 45minute , intervals, and occasionally there is a rush as people greet travellers returning from Canton. Up above, the Victorianstyle clock tower—surrounded by multi-storey modern buildings—rings out the hour with broken chimes in a cracked reminder of olden days.

Badminton.—Canterbury badminton teams to play West Coast on Saturday are:—Third division: M. Berry. J. Findlay, J. Lang. D. Reid, Mrs R. Atwell, Miss G. Hampton. Miss S. Johnston, Miss N. Oliver. Junior division: G. Bobseln, Sanders, Stafford. P. Whiting, Miss G. Mathers, Mias T. Mitchell. Miss A. Ross and Miss R. Smith.