Passengers rise from their seats in the small café at the entrance to the Sabah State Railway station in Kota Kinabalu, Borneo. They pick up their fragrant nasi lemak – Malaysia’s famed rice dish cooked in coconut milk and pandan leaves and sold in brown paper pyramids – and their sweating 100 Plus sports drink cans to crowd onto the platform.
There are uncles wearing baseball caps or songkok, teenage boys making jokes, mums wearing colourful tudung and shouldering babies.
Above, lavender clouds pattern a peachy tropical sky. There’s no way the train will be on time. Everything runs late in Sabah, where my father was born and where I moved two years ago to live here for the first time in my life.
The train grumbles into the station, blue and white, diesel-powered – and amazingly, on time. It’s a bun fight to get on, but I battle for position and secure a seat.
Omar secured a seat on the busy carriages (Photo: Omar Musa)As far as I can tell, the train is full of commuters who work in the city but live in the villages and towns dotted along the coastline. The air conditioning blasts. The carriage’s interior is retro – faded cream with aqua and sea-green plastic seats. I exhale, thinking about the diagnosis I’ve just received, then sink into my seat.
At 5.30pm, the train creaks out of the station as scheduled. It’s quiet now, the late-afternoon calm punctuated by the giggles of young women. This is the only train line on the island of Borneo, the third-largest island in the world, or fourth largest, if you include the island-continent of my birth – Australia. Borneo is the only island shared by three nations: Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei.
The train gathers speed to a lazy clack. As we pass an airport and a shopping complex, I dream of the spectacular views I’ve been promised tomorrow on the second leg, from Beaufort to Tenom: the mighty churning Padas River, dramatic gorges and coffee plantations.
My nenek (grandmother) often talks about Beaufort as if it’s a world city, although it has a population of about 13,000. It took me a long time to realise that what she was saying is an English name. I had heard it as “Bofod”, thinking it was an Indigenous name. The city was named for Leicester Paul Beaufort – the British governor of North Borneo – in the late 1800s.
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The train rolls alongside an ugly highway that is interminably jammed. Sometimes, you’ll hear sirens blaring and cars will make way for what you think is an ambulance, but is, in fact, a rich man accompanied by a police escort, cutting a clean line through the traffic.
Sirens go off in my head regularly. My inner music follows a predictable (if ragged) pattern. Earlier today, at the hospital, I received a diagnosis that’s been a long time coming: bipolar disorder type two. I wonder if this plays a part in why I have always embraced the constant change of travel. Borneo has had a steadying effect on me.
The outer suburbs of Kota Kinabalu give way to green fields and blue-tinted hills, along with glimpses of the South China Sea.
Once, this ride was named the North Borneo Railway and was the obsession of a man who built it to exploit natural resources. North Borneo was under the control of a British trade company at the time – British North Borneo Chartered Company. It left behind sludgy mismanagement that was picked up with alacrity in the post-independence era, when British North Borneo became the state of Sabah and joined Sarawak, Singapore and Malaya in 1963 to form Malaysia.
There’s always discussion about improving the railway line, but its operation lags far behind the service provided by trains in Peninsular Malaysia.
One of the doors swings open with the train at full speed. Hot air rushes in. I go to use the bathroom. It’s clean, but the taps and flush don’t work. Instead, the basin has plastic bottles filled with water that you can use to wash your hands. A bucket of water to flush the toilet sloshes on the ground.
Outside, the ghostly outlines of slatted wooden kampung houses, blue mosques with gold minarets and the thick uniform trunks of oil palm disappear into the darkness. The crop drives Sabah’s economy. Palm oil is transported mostly by trucks and ships, and the major importers are China, India and the European Union.
There has been big talk of creating a trans-Borneo railway to allow easier transport of bulk cargo, including palm oil. A feasibility study is set to be completed in 2026. I wouldn’t hold my breath on it being constructed any time soon.
Before the cash crop of palm oil there were others, and these were the main reason for the construction of the railway.
The journey back offered more daytime views (Photo: Omar Musa)In the late 1800s, tobacco farms were founded in the interior of Sabah. A Scottish man named William Cowie, through skulduggery, charisma and force of will, became the director of the British North Borneo Chartered Company. Cowie had been a close friend to Sultan Jamal-ul Azam of Sulu, who had control over parts of North Borneo. His closeness to the sultan allowed him to help Alfred Dent, a British merchant, acquire a concession treaty to much of North Borneo for $5,000.
Dent went on to found the British North Borneo Chartered Company in 1881. As plots of land were sold to British planters deep in the jungle, Cowie became obsessed with the idea of building a train line from Jesselton (modern-day Kota Kinabalu, where I joined the train) to Tenom.
Previously the company had been run by governors based in Borneo. When Cowie was elected to the board of directors in 1884, he decided to pull the strings from London instead. He and his band of investors decided the fate of North Borneo and its inhabitants.
The North Borneo train network that so obsessed Cowie was mostly destroyed during the Second World War. Many locals were killed during this time, not just by the Japanese but in Allied bombing attacks, purportedly to smoke out Japanese soldiers.
Beaufort is now an hour away. Beaufort and Sipitang are the main Sabahan towns where my grandmother’s ethnic group – the Kadayan – reside. She is from a small village called Mesapol. There are also large populations of Kadayan in Brunei, Labuan and across the border in the state of Sarawak.
My grandmother is in her 90s (we think) and is also possibly my closest connection to understanding some of these things. But she, through her own hurt and many superstitions, is often unwilling to pass on information.
When I arrive in Beaufort at 8.30pm, the town is already shutting down. I check into a hotel and set my alarm for 6am, soothing my soul with thoughts of tomorrow’s adventure. Then, the train carries on its journey, through valleys and coffee plantations, alongside the churning brown Padas River, towards Tenom.
The railway carries on past the river (Photo: Davor Lovincic/Getty)Nenek was born so close to here, sometime in the 1930s, when the train was still used to exploit the interior. I wonder what stories she has about it.
I wake up at 6am and look out the window. The Padas River is moving past swiftly, brown, and the sky azure above. I’m excited for the next part of the ride.
I ask the friendly young man in the hotel’s reception when the next train to Tenom is, and he cheerily replies that there are no trains to Tenom due to a landslide. Landslides are common on the train line and the roads due to heavy rain, soil erosion and poor construction.
There’s nothing for me to do but drink coffee, buy some pandan cakes for my wife, and then wait for the train back to Kota Kinabalu. This time, what was mostly in blackness will be in full sunlight.
As the train leaves Beaufort for Kota Kinabalu, there are extravagant Chinese temples, a nod to the early Hakka labouring communities.
Passing through Membakut you see a large wooden building that once served as a train, the ground floor of which is occupied by Chinese storefronts. We roll on. There are padi fields, oil palm plantations, the same broken highway, all under an unrelenting sun.
As we approach my new home of Kota Kinabalu, malls and dangerously lowered cars appear, belching smoke. Home, yes.
Some of the journeys that change us are dramatic, eventful. Others, like this one, are a simple ride from A to B and back to A again. Funny how a train ride, where the most anticipated, exciting part is missing, can still be so illuminating. The train line is still working – a greedy, powerful man’s freight train transmogrified into a muted myth, truncated and fragile.
A shortened extract from The Untold Railway Stories edited by Monisha Rajesh, published by Duckworth, £16.99
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