CaptivatingRomania

Text: Bogdan Adrian Stănescu; Translated & adapted by: Ciprian Morar
Photo: Bogdan Adrian Stănescu; Vlad Mereuţă;

You’ve got to get up early to catch the “Mocăniţa” train on Vaser. Armed with all the photo gear, you get on your way towards the old train station, depou CFF Vişeu, dreaming about the steam that’s going to surround you , the “chuffing” sounds of the blastpipe and the wheels clacking rhythmically on the lazy rails.

It’s Saturday morning, just half past 5. A silly idea crosses your mind and you’re wondering whether you’ve gone completely crazy: - you’ve already spent 4 hours on the train, just in order to spend yet another 7 hours in the carriage of another train, without a precise destination in mind. This thought however, fades away almost instantly when a cloud of white thick smoke appears in the distance, rising slowly like a ghost from the horizon, on the top of the houses in Vişeu.
You feel the urge to walk quicker but the rush is short lived - the smoke is rising just from the chimney of an old factory. No sight of “Mocăniţa” , and you are continuing your quest through the nippy morning. The early morning în Vişeul de Sus is not picturesque, it looks as if even the shadows have left town.
After a bit more exploring, you stumble upon the first living soul, who, in exchange for some old cigarettes shows you the way to the… “- Wha’ you after ? Mocăniţă?…ahhh the train station… just take the first right and straight ahead….”

6 AM - having arrived at the train station, you wonder around, secretly admiring the rail workers who have been doing the same job for a lifetime, dressed the same, with exactly the same vocabulary and habits. These workers are not bothered about your camera, all they care is work . This seems so naturally well rehearsed, as if they have always been posing at work,…the platform becomes their catwalk, the steam engines the backdrop. .

For the untrained eye of a tourist, life in the Vaser area appears to be perfect, but for the locals, it’s not an easy one… Nea’ Vasile (you can use any name, especially if you forgot to ask him) begins telling you that he’s been doing the Cozia-1 locomotive job for over 30 years, that life is very hard in town and prices as steep as the hardship . As soon as these details are out of the way and the scene set, he swiftly moves onto describing Măriuţa, the most renowned and well looked after locomotive from the lot: “I take Her out only on special occasions - for example if they are filming some sort of an old movie here”. Another worker steps in and tells you that Măriuţa is so sparkly clean that wiping it with a white napkin will leave the napkin white. A pretty adventurous call indeed, seeing the state of a place, a train station where everything seems to be hibernating under a dark blanket of dust, ashes and diesel. If Măriuţa is indeed so sparkly clean, her sisters aren’t…: Cozia-1 , 764.469 and 763.193 (the old Moldoviţa) these two have the delight of being used daily for logging and other wood industry matters in the Vaser valley.

he three locomotives of the old CFF Vişeu depot (now called „SC Vişeuforest” and owned by “R.G. Holz”) robot themselves up and down the valley, taking empty wagons and bringing them back full of timber logs. The train to “Făina” is special. Apart from the freight wagons used for the wood, they also attach a wagons for passengers, for a wonderful journey (especially if you are a train lover!).

Two hours later, along with the crepuscular light, the team leaders show up: “Who are these guys?…- We are photographers. - And what are you doing here? - We are just taking photographs… - Aha then…” Well, it didn’t take too many firm words to figure out who was the security guard of that place (surely not the one who originally let you in). You quietly take your camera and move along the platform, along with everyone one else, families who are waiting for Mocăniţa. The ticket costs just 25 RON, after which… everything else is just pure poetry.

While the smoke is raising out from the locomotive chimney, slowly arranging and decomposing itself in the atmosphere, you try to break away from the other tourists, hoping to freeze on some mirific moments of your journey on camera. The journey is epic on the narrow 760 mm rail gauge.

The “magnificently high” speed of 30 kilometres per hour makes its statement and will often prevent you from capturing a sharp picture; the bumps and the knocks of the wagon propagating through your body, through to body parts you didn’t even know you possessed. The camera indeed isn’t spared either, but there is no reason to be worried, even the steam locomotive can run out of steam every now and again. She consistently needs to be fed and her cravings are monumental: she lusts for fire and water.

25 kilometres later and you realise that you’ve pretty much exhausted all the key moments from the journey and you are expecting and waiting for something new. You begin to wonder, and wonder…. “what’s the end of the journey?”. Another 16 kilometres more and the answer awaits you: nothing, at the end of the journey there’s nothing. You arrive at about 3 km from Ukraine, you get off, walk around for 30 minutes and then get back on the same train for the same journey back. . Perhaps its time to sleep now, but for the ones who aren’t able, there’s enough action in store to make things interesting again. You’ll be ever surprised by the ingenious maneuvers used to keep the pack of wagons together, the “breaking techniques” and other things which help the train going on the track.

Another 3 hours of decent and you’re quickly approaching Vişeu de Sus. The wait is near, passengers relieved: the signal on their mobiles is back on. . The relaxation, the “switch off” is over.

You’re back, “connected” again to the modern life

The end.

Used with permission from fixpix.ro