To Arabkir Station

So I took a walk along the train tracks.

The tracks run right past our house, just on the other side of our street. They're not very busy. There are just two scheduled trains per day, around 8 in the morning and 8 at night. They're reasonably punctual, which is nice: when the morning train passes, it's time for me to dress for work; the evening train comes right around the boys' bedtime.

Walking along the tracks was more interesting than you might think.

First impression: something slightly wrong. It took me a long time to figure it out. The tracks were too far apart. Russian train gauge, four inches wider.

Second impression: garbage. The tracks are a popular spot for fly dumping. Walking along them is just a long walk past refuse of every sort. It doesn't smell that bad -- I would guess most of the organic stuff gets scavenged by rats, crows and dogs pretty quickly -- but, wow, is it ugly.

In addition to the garbage, there's also a lot of junk. People dump things like old ovens and washing machines along the tracks.

Third impression: the tracks are in crappy shape. The sleepers were originally wood, but many have rotted away, or burned in brushfires. Some have been replaced by concrete sleepers, but many have not. The track bed is in visibly bad shape. Signs have fallen over or been vandalized; signals are obviously long dead.

I had vaguely noticed that the trains weren't very fast -- maybe 50 km (30 mph) tops. Now I know why.

We live in Arabkir (pronounced ah rab PKEER), which is a neighborhood that used to be a separate village. We're up on a plateau about 3 km from the center of town and maybe 100-200 m higher. From our hosue to central Yerevan is all downhill.

The tracks come up from the central station and make a big S-curve as they climb the steep slope above the city. If I followed them down long enough, they would take me right into the middle of Yerevan.

I didn't get that far. Partly this is because walking along train tracks is harder than ordinary walking, and I didn't feel like keeping it up for four or five km, even downhill. But mostly it's because it was depressing. Interesting, but depressing.

The constant garbage, of course. But also, the tracks went past abandoned factories, now rusting and empty. It was evening, and windy. The red light of sunset gave the rusting metal a peculiarly dark and dreary look, while the wind sent plastic bottles jumping and bouncing along the ground. Although the tracks ran through a densely populated neighborhood, there were few people around, and the wind blocked the sound of traffic. I could have been alone in a city left empty by some catastrophe.

And then there was the station. After maybe 2 km of walking: a platform, with stairs going up.

Once this had been a suburban stop for commuters. These things are pretty similar the world over. There was the little white building with a ticket window, and some business -- perhaps a small cafe -- around the back.

All dead now. The stairs were disintegrating and the railing had disappeared. The ticket window was shuttered. The station had obviously been closed for years, and was slowly surrendering to decay. Armenia's economy imploded after independence -- war, blockade, loss of their old markets. I suppose the commuter rail service was a casualty of that time.

It's not that Yerevan is generally in a state of depression. Far from it. The downtown is a maze of construction; cranes everywhere, and concrete dust hanging hazy in the air. Just a few hundred meters from the abandoned station is the top of the Cascades, a mammoth project that will connect the center of the town with the upper suburbs via a complex of stairs and escalators.

But there was something so unutterably dreary about the dead station that I couldn't go any further. I turned off the crumbling, garbage-strewn tracks and took another way.

And that was my walk along the railroad tracks.

Comments

[Colin Alberts]

I'd probably feel a twinge of melancholy myself about your description if I hadn't been cursing Amtrak earlier yesterday.

More seriously though, you say the station was used for communter trains. But what is the current status of intercity rail passenger transport in the Caucasus? If it still exists, does it connect to either the Russian or Turkish systems? Is it possible (not to say advisable) to ride the rails over long distances in those parts?

[Andreas Morlok]

>Second impression: garbage. The tracks are a >popular spot for fly dumping.

But that seems to be the case nearly everywhere -
OK, at least also in Germany and Britain.

Except Japan (of course), not even the tiniest pieces of grabage or even scrap metal along the tracks.

Andreas

[Mitch H.]

I think it's a function of whether the tracks are used for human transport, or just industrial purposes. There's a haulage rail that runs through my mountain town, with a number of side-tracks for various purposes, which I use to get to the town in the next valley over. While it is, indeed, kind of annoying to walk along tracks, you don't see the kind of rubbish and garbage that Doug describes.

Part of it might be that the local fly-fishermen use the tracks to get from place to place along the local creek by the railside, but most of it is that it's not easy to get to a track which only shifts gravel and coal and the like, and nobody's going to walk a mile to dump their trash by the tracks when they can just sneak over to one of the abandoned limestone quarry pits & fling it quickly over the edge.

Now the abandoned quarry pits - those are disgusting. Full of rubbish tips. But luckily, they're on the backend of nowhere, difficult to get into, and are technically private-property and well-marked with "no trespassing" signs to boot.

[Noel Maurer]

Andreas,

I feel the need to defend the developed nations here. I've never been to Armenia, of course, but I have travelled recently in the Philippines and Trinidad, and I have spent some time in Mexico. The level of trash dumped alongside roads and train tracks is quite a bit higher than anything I've ever seen in Britain, just as the amount of trash in Britain is a bit (not extravagantly) higher than in the United States.

You're not wrong, of course, people do dump garbage on train tracks (and roadsides) in Western Europe. But if Armenia is anything like the Philippines or Trinidad, the scale of the problem is much much much higher.

[Doug M.]

Much much is about right. I would say there's about a dump truck full of garbage every couple of hundred yards.

The line was once used for industrial purposes; there are spurs going into abandoned factories. But it's strictly for passenger transport now, two small trains a day.

Doug M.

[Christian Garbis]

Armenians like to dump garbage anywhere they can, even in pits or holes in and around there own neighborhoods. Strange phenomenon, apparently random dumping did not exist in Soviet times.

As far as the railways go, obviously there are in serious disrepair. It takes about 12 hours to get to Tbilisi from Yerevan by train, usually a five hour ride by car. Supposedly a railway link from Armenia to Russia via Georgia will be restored in the next couple of years....

[Bernard Guerrero]

But also, the tracks went past abandoned factories, now rusting and empty. It was evening, and windy. The red light of sunset gave the rusting metal a peculiarly dark and dreary look, while the wind sent plastic bottles jumping and bouncing along the ground.

Something vaguely romantic about that picture, in the classical sense. Might just be my northern Jersey upbringing talking.