Blogging China's elusive steam trains

Scott Lothes is traveling in China, seeking out and documenting the history of steam trains in that country. He's just arrived in a tiny, remote town called Lixin (Leesheen), in Heilongjiang.

Our group of rail photographers (...) spent the night in the railway workers' house in Lixin along the Huanan narrow guage coal railway. Lixin is the beginning of the steep climb for eastbound loaded trains, so it contains a modest servicing facility for the locomotives.

Modest would be a bit too gentle a way of describing the lodging accommodations, at least by western standards. There are absolutely no bathroom facilities, not even an outhouse. There is electricity, but it is quite sparse and the circuit of low capacity. A welder at the station caused the single-bulb pole light in front of the water tower to go dim, several hundred feet away. Our beds are best described as two wide, wooden tables covered in linoleum which may or may not have been cleaned with soap and water since they were built. We slept five to a bed, with blankets that may or may not have been washed since they were sewn. The one ingenious quality of the beds is that they are heated from beneath by the cooking stove (wood fired, of course) in the next room, and thus stay quite toasty, even on cold nights (of which there are plenty in far northeastern China).

Lixin can also be a very dangerous place at night, as three of us found out the hard way. I received one of the greatest shocks of my life when I stepped between two dark rails, expecting to find solid crossties, and instead found only open space. Five very swift feet later, my feet were on the ground in the bottom of the locomotive inspection pit. I would have escaped relatively unscathed had not my left cheek soundly struck the opposite wall on my way down. As a result, I now look like a chipmunk on the one side, it hurts to chew and bite down hard and there's a burst blood vessel in the corner of my left eye.

Link

I emailed Scott on the road in China to point out that his blog had some hinky linebreak formatting going on, and he replied:

I unfortunately have very little control over how my blog entries appear. Blogspot is blocked in China, so the only reliable way to make posts is via email. I tried sending three previous posts from the control panel of blogspot (which I am able to access), but none of them have appeared yet. At least that's what I'm told, as I'm not actually able to view my own blog here! Rather frustrating, but the trains make up for it all.

If anyone has helpful suggestions, his email address is on the blog.