While the phasing out of steam engines from North American railroads was virtually complete by 1960, other regions saw a much slower decline. Due in part to the high costs of the war on Europe, U.K. mainlines were not completely dieselized until 1968, and in Finland and France the process took until the mid 70s. While there are other examples of steam power remaining in service in the 80s and 90s, such as South Africa, India and Russia, the only major power to continue to use steam into the 21st century is China. The continuation of coal-fire steam in China into the 21st century, and it’s eventual phase out in favour of more conventional diesel motive power, serves as an example for understanding importance of economic conditions as well as branding and prestige in state-level transportation planning. More specifically, it might serve as an example of how the international recognition of global warming helped pressure a nation to cease its use of the dirtiest carbon fuel (coal), and therefore possibly prefigure the role of international prestige in future phase outs of coal-electric plants and non-traditional sources of fuel oil.

To understand why Chinese mainline freight and passenger railway service was largely steam powered in the year 2000, it’s important to recognize that diesel trains were introduced far later in China than in most of the rest of the world. Whereas the United States, Russia, and the U.K had their first diesel locomotive engines in the 1920s, the first diesel was not  in service in China until 1959 – at which point dieselization in the USA was almost complete. And China’s transition, although starting in the 50s, did not “pick up steam” until the 80s and 90s – the last mainline steam loco was built in 1999 , and very powerful QJ engines continued to pull coal trains on the Jitong railway until 2005.

Some of the reasons for China’s late use of motive steam power are simple – cheap, easily available labour meant much smaller savings would be acquired by switching to the small crews which diesel operation allows. Also, with huge reserves of coal mined by disposable, non-unionized wage labour, steam trains remained isolated from international oil prices. Russia acted on this principle as well – keeping a full thousand steam locomotives on standby in case of national emergency up until 1989. Other reasons are more complex – military industrial complex funding in the U.S. meant there was money to translate advances in tank engine design into locomotive design. Moreover, diesel operation has many benefits that go beyond simple economics which are highly valued in first world countries, such as cleanliness, simplicity of operation, but most important they are perceived as (or were in the 50s and 60s) “modern”. Capitalist, desire-based economies emphasize the new – there is always some new feature, or function, or things are getting faster, or smoother. Command economies (like the military-industrial complex, incidentally) are needs-based: if steam locomotives are fulfilling the needs of industry and transportation, there is no need to replace them with expensive modern equipment until the upgrade makes simple economic sense – and in a land of very inexpensive labour, this was perhaps never going to happen.

So, what happened – why did China ever switch to diesel and electric operation if steam fared so well for them – if they continued to construct large and powerful locomotives into the 1990s to pull coal trains on the Jitong line through Inner Mongolia until 2005, what was the final reason for switching over to diesel? I’m sure some would like you to believe that Chinese labour conditions are improving, and as a result there are greater savings from reducing the amount of labour required to run the Jitong line. But I think it’s far more likely that the dieselization of the Jitong line has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with international prestige. In 2005, just prior to the end Jitong steam, the International Herald Tribute reported:

There is no sense of regret in the Chinese government, which is anxious to crush all memory of something as old-fashioned as steam just a few years before the 2008 Olympics reach Beijing.

If we want to know why steam was phased out in Mongolia, or why coal fired steam is phased out anywhere it still makes economic sense, the only answer is political prestige. In his book “The Weather Makers”, Tim Flannery makes the point that North America too still runs on coal:

“Some power plants burn through 500 tonnes of coal per hour, and so inefficient are they that around two-thirds of the energy created is wasted. And to what purpose do they operate? Simply to boil water, which generates steam that moves the colossal turbines to create electricity that power our homes and factories. Like the great aerial ocean itself, these Dickensian machines are invisible to most of us, who have no idea that this nineteenth-century technology makes twenty-first-century gadgets whirr.” (The Weather Makers, p. 30)

The continuance of coal fires steam power plants in North America to this day demonstrates quite clearly that the “Age of Steam” never ended – it ended only in public perception. In reality, many ipods, laptops, electric trains, even coffee makers are powered by coal-fired steam. And, there is no reason to think that our age of steam will end for any reason other than the one that motivated the demise of the Jitong railway – public perception, and political prestige. If sites like this one contribute to making coal perceived as a fuel of the past, and for the right reasons (the science), then we can rightly be said to be contributing to the conditions under which Stephen Harper finds it politically useful to institute the phase-out of coal-fired electricity.