Taming the desert sand to run a rail route
Print Edition
Every day, 11 sets of passenger trains and 36 sets of cargo trains run along the Baotou-Lanzhou Railway. Protected by seedlings, grass hedges and trees, carriages tear through the southern edge of the Tengger Desert with ease.
The Baotou-Lanzhou Railway, which began operating in 1958, is an artery linking northern China to northwestern regions. It starts at Baotou in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and stretches to Lanzhou, capital of Gansu Province. The 990-kilometer rail link passes through the Tengger Desert in the city of Zhongwei in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region six times.
An aerial view of the railway through the desert showcases the efforts against the forces of nature: moving sand dunes tamed by vast stretches of man-made straw structures, a technique originating from Ningxia, now known around the world.
The railway also runs through Shapotou, whose name means high-rise dunes. The region has 16km of moving dunes, reaching up to 100 meters high.
“To ensure the successful operation of the railway, the desert needed to be tamed,” said Zhang Zhishan, deputy director of the Shapotou Desert Research and Experiment Station under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
“The desert was only 200 meters from Zhongwei. Experts from the former Soviet Union, invited to design the railway, once proclaimed it would be buried by sand in 30 years,” said Gao Yonggui, deputy head of the Zhongwei Gusha (Dune-Fixing) Forestry Farm.
August 1 marks the 60th anniversary of the opening of the Baotou-Lanzhou railway.
Sandy weather used to hit Shapotou 300 days a year. The year after the railway went into operation, sand buried the rails and suspended operations 11 times, Gao said.
Observation station
In 1955, the CAS established its first observation station in Shapotou. The next year, China’s first forestry station in the desert was founded in Zhongwei. To address the issues the sand was causing, workers and researchers began relentlessly experimenting with desert control techniques.
Straw structures, which resemble checkerboards, remain the most convenient, environment-friendly and cheapest way of stopping sand encroachment. In Zhongwei, farmers make the straw checkerboards almost daily. Women place the straw on top of the sand, and men use a shovel to partially bury it in the sand, creating a checkerboard pattern spaced 1 meter apart. Each piece of straw is 10 centimeters below ground and 30 centimeters above ground.
Within the checkerboards, the surface of the sand forms a hard crust over time which prevents the sand from moving.
In Zhongwei, about 10,333 hectares of sand is covered by these straw checkerboards. Shrubs, windshield belts, and grass belts are also constructed to keep the railway safe. The fight against sand never stops in Zhongwei. Sand has been kept away from the rails since the 1990s, locals said.
“It is from Shapotou that China’s experience of fighting desertification became known to the world,” said Zhang.
In 1977, China shared the Shapotou anti-desertification technique at the UN Conference on Desertification in Nairobi, and in 1994, the Zhongwei forestry farm was elected to the UN Environment Program’s Global 500 Roll of Honor for its achievements in sand control.
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