At the beginning of June, our Editor asked me to write an article for the Oily Rag, but by the time that I was to go on holiday with my family to Bangkok and Malaysia, I still hadn’t thought of what to write. We reached our destination and when my mother was taking photos, she suggested that I should write about the different modes of transport that we were using in Bangkok & Malaysia. So here we are, a small description on each mode of transport that we used and the benefits of using them.The first city we visited was Bangkok, the capitol of Thailand. Here there are three main types of transport other than the car or motorbike.
My favourite of which is the ‘Tuk-Tuk’. These vehicles have a small motorcycle engine in the middle of a trike chassis, but instead of having a pedal gear change as in normal bikes they have been adapted to use a small car gearbox. he steering comes from the same vehicle. They are designed to carry two passengers and a driver, but usually three or four get crammed into the back of this tiny machine.They are in many different colours and with stickers on the front, back, sides and even on the drivers forehead. The two salient features of a ”Tuk-Tuk” are the padded seat and a small piece of rope for a handle to hold - necessary because of the great rate of speed that they travel around tight corners and when weaving in and out of traffic.
The second form of transport is the ‘sky-train’. This runs on a similar width track to our standard gauge, picking up an electrical feed from another rail running alongside one of the main rails. The ‘sky-train’ is also cheap and fast to get around Bangkok. The train is computerised from offices near to the main station at one end of the line. There is a driver in the cab who operates the doors and there is a manual over ride for the brakes within the cab.
There are two ‘sky-train’ routes that meet halfway on each route. On one route it also meets with the underground system. The benefits of travelling with the ‘sky-train’ are that it is cheap, fast, easy to use with seats on board and you can even watch the funniest TV adverts on your one minute journey between each station.
The last means of transport that we used in Bangkok was a boat. There are many different types of boat going up and down the river, but one caught my eye in particular. This was a long thin boat with a tarpaulin for a roof. The boatman sat at the rear (or stern) of the boat holding a long pole with two levers. This is attached to a car engine and gearbox mounted on a pivot which allows the engine and gearbox to move up and down, left and right. From the gearbox the drive shaft goes about 1 metre out of the boat and turns a small propeller. One day during our visit we took a tour to see a floating river market and took one of these boats to an area used in the James Bond film ( Man with the Golden Gun). Compared with most other boats on the river these are quick! But at this speed you lose some of the already minimal comfort and they can be very bumpy. The only benefit of these boats is that they are cheap.
After six days in Bangkok we flew south to a small island off the coast of Malaysia called Penang, There was only one type of transport on the island that I was interested in writing about. Penang Hill is the largest hill on the island and because of the lower temperature at the top, the Government built a Rest Home there. The problem is in getting up there. You could take a horse and cart but that would take nearly a day to reach the summit. In 1906 a group of British business men decided to build a hotel at the top of the hill with a railway to reach it. The railway was built in two stages with a station halfway up the hill where you would change trains. In 1923 the railway opened its doors to its first paying passengers. The top station is 703.94 meters above sea level. The funicular railway is one of only two left in the far east. The other is in Hong Kong but that is a modern version. Originally, only two coaches worked the line with one on each section. Now there are two trains on each section. The original coaches have been split. One is still on the hill as a static model, the other is in the Malaysian National Museum in the capital, Kuala Lumpur. Each coach has a steel cable attached to the front with the cables wound on a drum powered with an electric motor. At certain points on the track the trains pass on a small loop. So that the cables don’t get caught up, they have pulley wheels running the length of the track in a “V” shape. One train’s cable sits on one wheel to the left of the track with the other train’s on the opposite side.

There are many more modes of transport in the far east and I strongly recommend that you go there and find these for yourself! It is well worth the 10 1/2 hours flight.
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