Hello Group,
I can state with some authority that the NG main between Saigon and Hanoi is intact and very busy. there are many express and local passenger trains every day and all night long, more than one train per hour. There is an express train that runs Saigon to Hanoi and vice versa called the re-unification express.
Most of the bridges are road/rail affairs and have guard shacks on each end manned (usually by several men) 24 hours a day. Usually when you cross you can see them drinking tea and playing chess or some other game inside. When a train crosses an alarm bell rings, red and white striped gates are rolled across the road and a guard stands at attention as the train passes, at night holding up square kerosine lanterns like the one in the 1964 movie "The Train". Many many times i have been over two of these in particular in Bien Hoa over branches of the Saigon River. Last year there was a tie gang replacing bridge ties, squaring then and boring the holes for the long screws as the french do by hand, large pots of green tea and rice boiling away nearby in the mid day heat. labor is cheap and the Vietnamese railways employ a lot of people.
Quite a number of times while traveling in Vietnam you get the feeling the french just left, though indeed there are a lot of french people still in Vietnam. Most non rail travel is by bicycle or motorbike. Very, very few have cars. But Vietam Air has excellent, relatively inexpensive service which may make the passenger trains empty out in the years to come.
Steam is all gone, which is a shame, since when the war ended in 1975 there was a plethora of NG 4-4-0s, 4-6-0s 4-6-2s and 2-8-2s around. I suppose what RPGs didn't take out in the war, the Nguyen steel works got. There are some preserved post 1945 SCAM (french loco works) 2-8-2s around and there are supposedly 2 operable 4-6-2s identical to the Vietnamese ones in Cambodia, which makes sense since both countries made up parts of French Indo-China at the time. The engines used today are quite a variety of NG diesels no doubt built in Russia. My personal favorites look like meter gauge copies of ALCO RS-1s
Apart from that, every little burg seems to have its own little french colonial depot, some with train order signals and all with switches that have kerosine lamps and every evening a fellow goes along, fills, trims the wicks and lights them. the whole thing seems like the US system in the 50's save the farmers trudging along behind their water buffalos in their conical hats.
SE asia can be an otherworldly experience for a westerner. When you step off the plane down to the tarmac (jetways are few) the heat and humidity hit you like a blast as does an odor elusive to describe. As Graham Greene said in "The Quiet American" "Your shirt is straight away a rag, you can hardly remember who you are or where you came from." Vietnam is a riot of intensity of heat, light, dirt, dust. It is every shade and chroma of green, the deepness of cool bottle blue nights with frogs barking in the water spinach fields as fireflies flicker in and out of the dark trees. Smoke from the Joss sticks in the temples and on the graves in the rice paddies, And the smells of baked earth, Mint, slow cooked pork and diesel exhaust.
Here is a link to an australian site about the Vietnamese railways you folks might find interesting [
railwaysinvietnam.com].
The reason i know so much about the subject is that my wife and in laws are Vietnamese, and the small hotel i always stayed at in the years we were courting was near the two river bridges i described. The sounds of the train passing in the night often lulled me to sleep. if you wish to know what travel in Vietnam is today, seek out the Anthony Bourdain videos on youtube. The vietnam i found is the one he described.
