Poland: adopt a steam locomotive scheme

[John Ashworth]

'ADOPT-A-LOCOMOTIVE' HELPS OLD POLISH ENGINES BUILD UP STEAM

AFP January 26, 2012, 4:02 am

JAWORZYNA SLASKA, Poland (AFP) - Inch by grimy inch, a group of volunteers at a Polish railway museum is scraping away at decades of rust and soot to restore old locomotives to their former glory.

Their enthusiasm for steam doesn't stop with the painstaking labour. Several of the volunteers are happy to pay 400 euros ($500) to "adopt" a century-old heavy hauler.

"This steam train symbolises liberty," said steam engine enthusiast Janusz Boratynski, a professor of immunology in his 60s. "When I was little, it transported me from my city of Wroclaw, ruined by the war and teeming with rats, to a holiday spot on the other side of the country."

Boratynski said he jumped at the chance to adopt one of the engines in particular: the Tki3, a brooding hulk of red-trimmed black metal built in the early 1900s.

In return for his adoption fee, which covers the cost of a new coat of paint, Boratynski will have his name etched into a plaque on the antique locomotive, once famed for having set a speed record of 110 kilometres per hour (68 mph).

Boratynski said he dreams of seeing his engine back on the tracks, speeding down the line at full throttle.

"It's not enough to give the locomotives a fresh coat of paint, we must bring them back to life!" he said, adding that he'd like to switch the engine from running on coal to diesel, which could let it go even faster.

"But it's not easy to convince purists and the museum staff," he said

The Jaworzyna Slaska museum is a former train depot located some 60 kilometres (40 miles) outside Wroclaw in western Poland. When the depot closed in the 1990s, many of its ageing locomotives stayed there and risked being stripped for their scrap metal.

The hulking engines were saved thanks to a group of train enthusiasts, former railway workers and local authorities, as well as a private backer.

The oldest of the 120 steam engines dates from the 1890s, and train aficionados are especially fond of the locomotives that were built in Poland between the two world wars.

It takes volunteers about six months of painstaking work to restore the locomotives, and with five new "adoptions" this year, volunteers will have their hands full.

"To work here you really need to be crazy about steam trains," said 22-year-old Michal Krawczyk as he scrapes rust from an old engine to prepares it for a fresh coat of paint.

Museum director Katarzyna Szczerbinska-Tercjak said train adopters come from all walks of life.

"A young mother from Warsaw adopted a locomotive for her son Aleksander's birthday," Szczerbinska-Tercjak said. "A German-Polish couple adopted one to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary."

She said the museum and its adoption scheme had saved many historic engines from ending up as scrap metal.

Many in the West still associate Poland's train tracks with the transport of Jews to the country's Nazi concentration camps when it was occupied by Germany during World War II.

There is no way to know for sure how the museum's trains were used during wartime, but most trains carrying Jews arrived from other countries.

The private museum drew 30,000 visitors last year, many of them railway enthusiasts from across Europe, said Krzysztof Gryzgot, a museum employee and retired railwayman who spent most of his career driving steam engines.

He practically swoons when talking about the 80-tonne, Polish-made PT31 engine. Of the total 110 engines produced in 1931, just two survived World War II.

"Even today, she's still the pride of Polish railways," Gryzgot says of one surviving engine parked at museum.

It would take about 350,000 euros ($450,000) for a full restoration of the engine. Despite the sum, Gryzgot still holds out hope it may get back on the tracks.

"We've already found a company that can do it. I'd also like to see it retrace it's old route, from Wroclaw to Budapest, all the way to Istanbul," he enthused.