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Double-Track Triple-Meet at Ragama Railroading Old-Style in Sri Lanka
by DANA DE ZOYSA

I'm still not sure what kind of meet it should be called. Maybe there's no name for it in North America or Europe, but it's everyday railroading in Sri Lanka.

I was on the Kandy-to-Colombo Intercity Express. This is the speed king of the rails in this hilly Ireland-sized country south of India. It drops fifteen hundred feet from the cool highlands of mountain-and-tourist-rich Kandy to steamy, sweaty overpopulated Colombo, the capital, where 30 percent of the country goes to work.

Colombo is where Kandyans work to pay for the privilege of living in Kandy. Hence the Monday morning Intercity Express highballs the 106 downhill miles in a flat two-and-a-half hours, fastest train in the country, screeching into Fort Station at quarter to nine. As the Intercity is filled with bankers, posh political flunkies, and newspaper editorial writers, it has priority over everything else on the line. Almost everything, since wild elephants still occasionally stand unyieldingly between the rails, trumpeting balefully as the little ones scamper—yes, that's the right word—out of the way. Locomotive drivers cite "Elephant Halt" on their trip logs as often as for what is termed "natural necessity" in this land of prim euphemisms. Sometimes an "Elephant Halt" is so the conductor can pick a species of wild herb reputed to healing choler, cough, and catarrh; other times it's to drop off a basket of food for an ailing retiree who still keeps up his union dues and thus has the drop-off "provision privilige" of a full-time employee who lives up in the hills far from any road.

Hence nobody questions the entry "Elephant Halt" on dispatchers' time sheets. The watch-glancing bureaucrats back in the coaches are unlikely to detrain to check out what's going on up front, canny rails aboard will chalk it up to the ultimate slow order, and certainly no doubting trainmaster is going to order a track supervisor to check it out. Handcars in Sri Lanka are exactly that: you push it along with a stick like a punter crossing a stream; the luxury models have those little teeter-totter lever-and-gear mechanisms on top that most people know only from old Lionel Trains catalogs. Great for shoulder muscles, godawful for lower backs. Moreover, track workers can quote verbatim the Ministry of Rehabilitation and Social Services law that compensates victims of wild elephant attacks the sum of 50,000 rupees or $1,000 if they are totally disabled for the rest of their life. With wild elephants a mere whole-body crumple is the least of your worries. Hence no one questions an "Elephant Stop" unless it's three times in front of the same house.

The double track triple-meet at Ragama began like this: Ten miles out of the crowded, dusty, raspy, overly motorscootered commuter junction of Ragama in the shimmering 90°F of 8:30 a.m., the Intercity Express slowed and switched from the left track to the right—against the flow of oncoming traffic. (Sri Lanka's rails, like its roads, are routed British style.)

Proceeding against traffic on double track has a 20 mph speed limit, usually interpreted as 40. In this instance, however, the driver was doing about 30. With a sudden teeth-clenching wail and diesel-fume roar, Train B—a dowdy, lowly commuter's special, third class according to the ticket but fourth class in amenities like slatted wood benches—passed us ... on our left. This is equivalent to a Cessna passing a 747 on the wrong side during final approach to L.A. International.

Our train sped up to match the speed of the other, presumably so the drivers up front could have a chat. Hence for several miles the respective coaches lurched and yawed as the teenage passengers hanging from the doorways took the advantage of crossing the speeding chasm below to get a free ride on the Intercity, knowing the conductors had dropped off miles previously at Rambukkana to catch the morning Intercity groaning uphill to Kandy. Up to the top from there, the 3 percent-plus parts of the grade accumulate so much sand on the ground they have developed dunes.

The stream of humanity leaping from the jam-packed commuter to the airy luxuries of First Class on the Intercity was decorously dressed in white shirts open at the next (office workers), ready-to-wear print cotton saris (university students on the way to classes), and girls wearing drapy blue dresses and white wimple-like scarves (Muslim schoolgirls). The latter's school uniform rules require them to wear running shoes; the result looks like a convention of nuns in Nikes.

As a writer accustomed to the sometimes hilariously bizarre scenes of daily life in Asia, all this was far from unusual. However, an on-the-fly ticket upgrade from third to first was new. As doors are never closed on Sri Lankan trains, I went to one, hung on to the step-up bars with one hand, held my camera at arm's length facing forward into this mass of transferring humanity, and shot away as fast as the motor-drive would go. Out of all of them, one good picture.

All this and we were still five miles from Ragama.

"Ragama" is a pejorative, not much appreciated by people who live there. It means "Toddy Town"—ra is the generic word for "alcohol" and gama means "town". At one time there was a charity home for dying derelicts here and the town has never recovered from its history.

Toddy in Sri Lanka is not the warm rum-and-clove drink you order in a London pub as it pelts down outside in the middle of winter. Rather, it is the juice of the kitul palm flower, gathered by fearless men from the tops of palm trees forty feet and more off the ground. On the SLR (Sri Lanka Railways) run along the coast from Colombo to the tourist beaches of the south, surrounding the town of Bentota you will see palm trees seemingly strung together by strands of rope, looking rather like a fence for very tall giraffes. Look closely and amid the coconuts there will be clay pots twined to the ends of wrist-sized stems branching off the palm. The pots enclosed the fat, purple flower of the kitul's blossom, which if left undisturbed would open into a pod of hundreds of brilliant yellow nubbins each the size of a rice grain. These eventually ripen into a fruit which has the faint taste of molasses.

Molasses is, of course, cane or palm juice on its way to being sugar. However, time out of mind ago someone discovered that if you tie the unopened kitul flower closed and slit the sides with a knife, the juice that would go into developing the nubbins simply keeps on flowing. This juice is very sweet—indeed, when boiled to kill off yeasts and bacteria it is the principle ingredient in jaggery, a coarse, incredibly sweet crystal hard enough to chip teeth. Sri Lankan children adore it. Given the phalanx of pristine bright white you see in every youngster's smile, the dentist lobby is apparently not to be taken lightly here.

If your ride to the south is one of the early morning runs, you will see toddy-tappers crawling along those palm-top ropes with a clay pot attached to their waists. They go to each flower's pot, decant the juice that has gathered overnight, and, back on the ground, pour it into one of the many barrels you see mounted on trestles all along the route. This juice is toddy. It ferments in those barrels into what tastes like beer brewed from chrysanthemums and looks like cottage cheese congealing out of soap scum. Toddy is clearly an acquired taste.

Much easier to acquire is the taste for jaggery, which is why it is sold at all the train stations as a take-along snack. Along with the unsalted peanuts and fresh mangos and pineapples sold by the trackside vendors at every stop, jaggery sweetens away the leisurely hours it takes Sri Lankan trains to go anywhere. For the more venturesome, bhondi is not to be missed. Fried into palm-sized ovals from rice flour, mashed shrimp, cumin, garlic, and dried chilis, they taste like heaven, digest like lead, and turn your tongue into what you are certain has just tasted the surface of the sun.

Back on the way to the meet in Ragama, I lingered over this reminiscence as the parallel tracks with their simultaneous trains diverged to shouting rather than talking distance. The newly arrived passengers stood in the aisles and hung out the doors chattering gleefully. Watching the bold-boy-meets-demure-girl conversations developing around the SLR's made-to-order conversation opener ("Weren't you scared?") I jotted a note about sociological changes attributable to rail transport in Sri Lanka. In time this was phrased as a question to an SLR official in Colombo whose answer was the most fascinating rationale for low track maintenance I have ever heard: "We are mindful that, despite the inconveniences of rail travel imposed by our budget constraints, friendships, even marriages, have resulted from the opportunities that unavoidable delays present to people who choose to make the best out of life's events."

This could have just as easily have come from one of the island's ubiquitous saffron-robed Buddhist monks, or bhikkhus. Buddhism is the pre-eminent religion on the island, and despite computers, autos, and labor-saving appliances, is still the islanders' preferred way of life. Several of its tenets are worth noting. One is the above idea of making do with whatever life presents to us. Another is doing the best deeds we can in this life because if we persist our next life will be better. Dogs, devils, and beggars are what happen when we don't.

Hence, as the languorous eyes and exchange of workplace addresses took place in the aisle and doors (wooing is a face-to-face matter in Sri Lanka; it would be unthinkable to ask for a date on the phone), my ears perked to a more distant sound. Coming from somewhere on one of the cars ahead was a song. High, wailing, over and over. It was a roundelay, a song of verses each of whose last line is the first line of the next. Distant, muted among the burbles of conversations around me, it was as distinct as a pheasant's skrawk at dawn in wheat country.

It was the Blind Beggar's Song.

There are twelve castes of beggars in Sri Lanka; hundreds more in caste-crazy India. Sri Lankan castes amount to job descriptions—toddy tappers are durawas, for instance, always have been, always will be. Sons who climb trees to help dad don't need to go to school to learn how.

Of Sri Lanka's beggars, the most archaic caste got their start in old temples. They are the ones you have in mind when you think of Asia's beard-to-the-belly, loincloth-thereafter look. More modern counterparts dating from Colonial times have carved out a tidy territory in front of department stores. A new emerging entrepreneurial caste has discovered automatic teller machines; a fact that will keep Ph.D. candidates busily writing theses for years to come.

Four Sri Lankan castes specialize in railways. The kinnara platform beggar's turf ends where the rail coach begins. Hena washroom beggars sit on cloths in front of the gaping craters which pass for the entrances to comfort facilities (which is why train crews prefer the countryside). Crippled batgama beggars board bearing photocopies of official state seals attesting to their lifelong affliction, which somehow lose a good deal of legibility having been recopied and re-recopied an unguessable number of times; apparently Xerox hasn't yet noticed this potential profit center.

Ahikantika or blind beggars, however, differ from the others in that they really suffer what they say they do. Their roundelay song is the story, in verse, of how it happened. All blind beggars sing the same melody, but use their own words. This is why there is a minor niche for writers able to craft the cumbersome details of an industrial accident into a four-stanza poem of four lines, each with twenty-one syllables.

One school of thought holds the song's brief length evolved so passengers wouldn't be turned off by the details, yet be ever reminded of the need for karuna (compassion) if they are to save themselves from a bad future birth. Another school compares the rhythm of steel wheel on steel rail with the rhythm of the song and asserts these beggars would be out of a job if the trains ran faster. This seems a brusque view considering the slim donations that clank into their latter-day begging bowls made of an empty soft-drink can. Inauthentic as a pop-top begging bowl may seem, they in fact do double service by lending credence to the image of poverty while also making it impossible for light-fingered types to put in one coin while slyly extracting two.

This blind beggar's song receded wheezily into the distance as the train neared Ragama. The commute special had unaccountably sped ahead on the right track while we on the wrong track lazed along at 20 mph. I was mystified. Slow track is hardly news in Sri Lanka, but I've ridden the Intercity long enough to know it runs up through 20 mph on the way to speed and down through 20 mph when there's a stop, but it never runs at 20 mph.

I stepped to the open door and looked out over the iridescent green paddy lands brimming with green sprouts. In the distance a Buddhist monastery gleamed pure white amid an ocean of thousand-greened fields. Then I saw why we were going so slow. About fifty gandy dancers ahead had moved to clear the tracks. Around them were piles of riprap and dozens of concrete slabs. For years SLR has been replacing its old wooden sleepers (the Asian railroading term for ties) with spiffy new concrete ones. All along the most traveled routes you will spot massive piles of these sleepers ten high and hundreds deep. Often these stacks are almost engulfed with ivy and sweet pea creepers, which testifies to (a) how fast things grow in this land of 200 inches rain a year, and (b) the pace of renewal on the Sri Lanka Railway system.

The riprap glinted beautiful sparkles of blue and garnet color off the crystalline gneiss and schist that form the geologic backbone of the island. Backlit by the sun as they were today, they become the tropical equivalent of sun glitter off newly fallen snow. Indeed, brilliant light and intense color is such a major element of daily scenery in Sri Lanka the country can be likened to life on the inside of a diamond.

Life on the other side of the tracks is another matter, however. The gandy dancer's life has never been an exotic one, and here it has changed so little since the first Sri Lankan rails were laid down in the 1830s that if you want to know what it was like to work on the Union Pacific line from St. Louis to Frisco, come watch it still being done in Sri Lanka.

Once the riprap has been side-chuted from the tip-hoppers to trackside, here is virtually no further mechanization. Why buy expensive machines when sweat labor costs two dollars a day? Hence the sleepers are unceremoniously tossed off their flatcars in tangled heaps. Eight men grasp breaker bars with a hook on one end and a tamper blade on the other, lift each sleeper by its cast-in rebo-bar loop and sweat, cuss, and groan it to abut the old tie it is about to replace.

Meanwhile another ten men with six-foot claw bars rip out the old spikes and toss them aside. With the help of yet another ten men they lever both rails off to the far side. Switching bars for shovels, they hand-carry load after load of stone and spread it into the toothy gaps left by the old ties. Leveling is accomplished by hand-tamping with the breaker bar blades and a sight level made out of two clay pots of water with a long string between them. Pulled as taut as it can, the string forms a rough level the works engineer sights along from clay-pot lip to clay-pot lip. This, so they allege, gives a reasonable sense of level to grade. This "reasonable sense" is one reason why SLR's trains are among the most teeth-jolting rides in Asia.

Primitive though it seems, this same system was used in Sri Lanka for 2,300 years to build the "bunds" or dikes that shaped the country's "tanks" or irrigation reservoirs. Indeed, this tiny island's irrigation system is one of the marvels of ancient civil engineering and would have qualified for one of the wonders of the ancient world except that they were too far from Alexandria in Egypt where the cartographer Ptolemy first wrote the rulebook on ancient wonders.

Once the track is leveled, the new sleepers are dragged to their places and set flat atop the riprap. Nothing is piled up around their flanks. The rails are levered back and now bolted rather than spiked into place. Switches are still bedded on wooden ties, which are cut to length by hand using saws from out of the fondest dream of a retired logger.

Some time ago a decision was made to "hang" the joints in the open air between the concrete sleepers to make it easier to unbolt and replace them. The tiny but incessant whang of wheels crossing these joints has resulted in what the technical journals refer to as "downward deformation" and what the average rider refers to as the roughest track they can remember. Add to this that the coastal routes are bedded on sand in a region where it can rain up to two feet a day when the July monsoon arrives, and you have track sinkage that has passengers holding on to their seats even at a modest 40 mph. Walking down the aisles is like trying to walk the length of a loping elephant. The cafeteria staff fills the tea cups only to half, and even then you lose most of it.

Still, all this pales into unimportance compared with the visual exoticisms of riding the rails in Sri Lanka. From my vantage in the open coach door I saw us pass a flagman in a sarong holding out a green banner threadbare from many furlings. We picked up speed and soon re-passed the commuter special on our left. The youngsters had by now waved so often to each other it was getting as collegial as a class picnic.

Ahead Ragama station hove into view. The commuter special, on our former right of way, stopped to pick up passengers. Frantic to get to the office on time and knowing the buses are even worse, the passengers elbowed, pushed, and shoved their way on. I've been aboard SRL's commuter "railcars" often enough to know what it is like. Strangers sit on each others' laps or crease their bottoms using the window ledges for seats. The toilets are standing room only and youngsters are stowed safely out of harm up on the baggage racks. The already overstuffed doorways bulge yet further as the inner line of passengers hold on to anything solid and the outer passengers hold on to each other—a travel arrangement that gives certain commute trains the sobriquet "White Knuckle Special". It is such a part of daily life getting to work in Colombo the youngsters consider people like myself who pony up the 60 rupees ($1.20) for Second Class to be too stodgy for words.

The commuter to our left—Train A—now stopped, we slipped over a pair of crossover switches to assume our rightful role as fastest train on the line, all 40 mph of it, the 1800-hp Hunsletts up front chuffing happily through the transitions on a proper set of tracks at last.

Then I saw why we'd been bypassed over to the wrong direction then re-bypassed here. Hardly fifty yards past our crossover point was yet another commute train—Train B—headed also to Colombo and patiently awaiting our meet. It was sardined as tightly as the one receding behind us. Later I learned that Train B was waiting for both ourselves and Train A to depart, then moved ahead over the crossover switch, reversed back through it to cross over to the right set of tracks, then heighed for Colombo. That's why commute railcars have full crews at both ends.

The dispatcher's logic for the meet had gone like this: We had right of way over all traffic, up-country or down. (The local lingo for "up-country", the equivalent of "boondocks", is "out-station". Kandy is very out-station.)

However commute train A had been ahead of us and would slow us down while it picked up its load ("passengers" is clearly not the precise word) in Ragama. So the dispatcher switched us over to the up-country track, gave us a fast-order which annulled the slow-order through the gandy dancers, and halted up-country traffic before the crossover switch in Ragama. However, as there was already a commute train in Ragama (Train B) only three or four minutes ahead of us, he switched that train to our (wrong direction) track ahead of us, parked it on the far side of the crossover switch, stop-ordered the two Kandy-bound trains at Horape, the station before Ragama, switched us over, sent commuter Train A on behind us, recrossed Train B to the correct tracks to follow Train A into Colombo, and finally cleared all Kandy and further up-country trains to proceed.

All this in ten minutes. Got it?

It took me awhile too. I got off at Maradana station just before Colombo Fort and walked to the dispatcher's shed, in the same building as Fort Station's switch tower. The duty dispatcher was amazed to see a foreigner walk in—and for that matter, amazed that a foreigner knew how to find a dispatcher's office (follow the signal cables and home in on the radio antenna).

He was even more amazed to see I could read a train sheet. He wouldn't let me take photos, but there it was in Sri Lankan Sinhala's bubbly script:

	Timetable	Actual Mins		Timetable	Actual Mins
Train:	arr. Ragama	arr. Ragama	Late	dep. Ragama	dep. Ragama	Late
Kandy ICE (InterCity Express)	08:36	08:36	0:00	08:36	08:36	0:00
Polgahawela/Colombo (Commuter Railcar A	08:28	08:36	0:08	08:38	08:38	0:00
Veyangoda/Colombo (Commuter Railcar B)	08:18	08:26	0:08	08:30	08:39	0:09

Not a bad piece of work, this. With one meet that can be likened to a sort of dispatcher's version of triple bypass surgery, he had turned two eight-minute-late trains into one nine minutes late, met and passed all three using one crossover switch, all despite slow orders for track work and two trains heading into the slots vacated by the three headed down. All without a single Elephant Stop.

You can forgive a lot of rough track for one ride like this.