The Jiayang train in the mountains of Leshan, Sichuan province, is one of the few steam trains running on narrow gauge railways in China, Victor Paul Borg reports

Blacksmith Yang Fuzheng doesn't normally work on Sundays but he made an exception on the day we visited. He greeted us, dressed in crispy clothes, with a whiff of a moustache and hair combed up - somewhat incongruous in the diminutive and ramshackle workshop.

Perhaps he had never had visitors who were appreciative of his anachronistic craft, a traditional blacksmith making spare parts for an equally old steam train that runs outside with great clamor.

"This business is now in its third generation, like the train," Yang said. "My father learned the trade from his father, and I learned it from my father. It's a fine craft and when I was young I could do a hexagonal nut by free forging, which requires good skill, but now I work with a die forge."

As he talked, Yang heated a rod of metal in the coal-fired oven until it was red-hot. Then he switched on the die forge, the only piece of mechanical equipment in the dim workshop, and the metal monster started pounding away with a rapid rhythm.

Yang held the red-hot metal, his hands swinging, nimbly forging the long metal spikes that serve to hold the rail-tracks in place. It was a scene from a bygone era.

Then we smelled the acrid burning coal, and heard the whistles and jangles and hisses, and we stepped outside to herald the steam train as it rumbled into Bajiaogou station.

"It's like a toy," mused Chen Yong, my travel companion and an aficionado of model trains. "My model trains are more technically advanced, but the paradox is that because it has no electronic controls and everything is manual, the Jiayang train can run whatever the trouble, unlike modern trains, when even the smallest breakdown in an electric element or circuitry can render the train idle."

The Jiayang train is one of the few steam trains running on narrow gauge railways in China. It still runs commercially a full 50 years after it was first launched. Next year the train will be designated as a State-protected historical relic.

Fifty years ago the State company Jiayang Group started extracting coal from a major mine in the mountains of Leshan in Sichuan province. At first the coal was hauled on a barge for the journey downriver out of the mountains, but a rail track was substituted for the barge after the river was dammed in 1958.

About 10,000 laborers were mobilized, but the job was arduous, and the construction dragged on for a year to complete the 20-km line that meanders along the contours of the mountains and goes through six tunnels. The company, short of cash, made compromises: An extraordinarily narrow track of 600mm was laid along an unusually steep gradient of 3.6 percent. The track also curves wildly; the line has more than five bends for every kilometer.

These conditions made the track treacherous. It took three days for the train to finish its first run, and for the ensuing year it was beset with failures - the locomotive sliding backwards, derailing, capsizing - and just one of the six expert engineers that were brought in managed to rein and pilot the train. Eventually, after a year, Jiayang stabilized the train by widening the track to a gauge of 762 mm (still narrow compared with the 1,435mm standard gauge) and devised a chute that dribbles sand onto the rail-track at the front of the train to increase friction between wheels and tracks.

"The company was proud that it had managed to succeed in such difficult conditions," said Yuan Chengfang, director of the tourism department at Jiayang Group.

Much of the Jiayang steam train operation relies on manual labor, including switching tracks.

The coal was eventually mined out by 1988 (now only a small, commercially insignificant mine remains), yet the Jiayang Group continued to operate the train as a social service. There is no road, and the train remains the only mode of transport out of the mountains for the inhabitants of Bajiaogou, the town that sprouted up at the end of the line on the back of employment opportunities presented by the mine.

The ticket price has remained unchanged, at a token 5 yuan and has run at a loss for 20 years. It takes a staff of 100 to operate the train and the company has to make all spare parts for the train in its workshop. By the turn of the century, the annual operating losses had risen to 2 million yuan ($292,800).

"In 2004, the provincial government asked us to find ways to minimize our losses and the local people wanted a road," said Yuan, the tourism director. "But when we decided to build a road and retire the train there was an outcry from train enthusiasts, and a lot of media coverage lamenting the loss of such a valuable piece of industrial heritage."

There was a reassessment and the provincial government decided to keep the train running for the sake of heritage preservation, and to foster a local tourist industry as a new economic lifeline for the train and Bajiaogou's inhabitants.

Now, three years later, tourism is taking off. Around 5,000 people visited last year, offsetting the train's operating losses by half.

A visit makes for a fascinating trip. Riding on the train or wandering around Bajiaogou is like entering a 40-year time warp. The town's urban fabric is stitched of dense and rugged tenements, but the atmosphere of industrialization is strangely quaint and even tranquil - partly thanks to the absence of cars. There are no roads, only alleyways and stairways meandering among the weathered old buildings.

Chen and I spent a few days dawdling aimlessly. One day we descended more than 100 m underground into the defunct mine, seeing the kind of claustrophobic drudgery and toil that miners have to endure. Then we trudged up a nearby slope for a high vista over the valley, surrounded by slopes of terraced fields and copses of bamboo and forest.

Other times we lost ourselves in the town's alleyways, marveling at the architectural tapestries - the cluster of buildings with attic windows built by the British technicians who worked in the mine during the war, the neo classical facades of the former administration building designed by Russian consultants, the squat utilitarian architecture of the old hospital and the imposing auditorium.

Former chairman Mao Zedong survives on some facades, along with his slogan about the glory of serving the people. Elsewhere murals depict the revolutionary in his Mao suit, hat and solemn gaze.

The exotic market has snake blood and herbal medicine stalls, outdoor dentists and barbers. The elderly chat over mahjong sets at the teahouse, the young men play basketball, the women gather at dusk to twirl delicately to music in the town square - typical of an earlier era.

More local bustle can be found on the train, watching the inhabitants go to town with agricultural produce and return laden with meat and household accessories. The locomotive runs like clockwork, taking a full hour to run its course, and the inhabitants have learned to time their lives by its passage.

We rode back and forth, like joy-riding teenagers. It occurred to me that the constraints and challenges that made the train an engineering feat 50 years ago are the same features that now make it a thrilling ride. A straight and flat line would make for a boring ride; it's the uphill struggle and constant bends - 109 bends to be exact - that makes the ride rousing, as the steam engine heaves like an iron horse.

The author is an associate in a niche company that leads tours to offbeat and authentic pockets of nature and culture in China and Asia (more info at www.peppermountains.com)