Sometimes the past doesn’t stay buried. Sometimes it comes
back, rusty and hungry, wearing a fresh coat of paint and the smile of
progress. That’s what they found out in Sulawesi when they decided to wake the
sleeping iron beast that had been dreaming in the tropical earth for nearly a
century.
August 18, 2014. A date that should have been circled in red
on somebody’s calendar, though nobody knew it at the time. That’s when they
held the groundbreaking ceremony for what they called the Makassar-Parepare
railway. Clean politicians in clean suits breaking clean ground with shiny
shovels, all of them grinning like they’d just discovered gold instead of
disturbing something that had been put to rest for very good reasons.
The locals—the old-timers who remembered their grandfathers’
stories—they knew better. They remembered the whispers about the kereta
hantu, the ghost train that used to run these very routes back when the
Dutch were still kings of this particular hell. But progress, as any fool
knows, has cloth ears when it comes to ghost stories.
Hermanto Dwiatmoko didn’t look like a man who believed in
ghosts when he laid that first rail on November 13, 2015. Neither did Governor
Syahrul Yasin Limpo, standing there in the humid morning air like Moses about
to part the Red Sea of bureaucracy. Two point one trillion rupiah—that’s what
they were gambling with, most of it coming from PT Celebes Railway Indonesia.
Money has a way of making people deaf to the screaming of history.
But history, as Stephen King knows all too well, has a way
of making itself heard.
The First Death
Over a century before, when the world was still young enough
to believe in empires that would last forever, the Dutch had built their own
iron dream across this same godforsaken landscape. Oh, they didn’t call them
trains back then—these were trams, they said, as if giving something a prettier
name could change its nature. Small locomotives that crawled through the jungle
like metal centipedes, carrying passengers who didn’t know they were riding on
borrowed time.
The first death came in 1930. Not a person—though there had
been plenty of those along the way—but the death of the railway itself. After
eight years of bleeding money like a gut-shot deer, they shut it down. Ripped
up the tracks. Scattered the iron bones to the wind and tried to forget.
But you can’t kill something that was never really alive to
begin with. You can only make it angry.
The Dreamers and the Damned
The story really begins with a man named van Sandick, Chief
Engineer of State Railways and Trams in the Outer Territories. A title that
sounded impressive enough to get him killed, if he’d been paying attention to
the signs. On June 10, 1916, Sandick and his merry band of surveyors—L. Coster
van Voorhout, C. N. Prior, and a man named Brouerius Meyboom whose name alone
should have been warning enough—traveled from Makassar to Parepare.
They were looking for the perfect place to build their
tramway, these men in their white suits and pith helmets. They wanted to
connect Parepare to the lowlands of Sidenreng, Sopeng, and Wajo, maybe push all
the way to Bone if the gods were smiling. Seven million, two hundred and twenty
thousand florins—that’s what they figured it would cost to tame this particular
piece of wilderness.
The jungle, of course, had other ideas.
De Locomotief ran the story first, back when
newspapers still had the stones to print the truth. “Verkenningsverslag uopens
tramplannen in Z. Celebes”—a report that read like a death warrant, if you knew
how to read between the lines. The jungle was hungry, they said. The mountains
were waiting. The lakes and basins stretched like open wounds across the
landscape, and the Camba mountains squatted in the distance like sleeping
giants with indigestion.
The Dance with the Devil
By September 27, 1917, according to the Algemeen
Handelsblad, the government had grand plans. Two railway lines, they
said—one from Takalar through Makassar and Maros to Segiri, another from
Parepare to Singkang. A gauge of 1,037 meters, because precision matters when
you’re building a highway to hell.
The site survey would take two years, they promised.
Construction would start within three if everything went according to plan. But
in Sulawesi, as in most places where the dead don’t rest easy, nothing ever
goes according to plan.
On November 30, 1918, at exactly 9:15 in the morning—and why
is it that disasters always seem to have such precise timestamps?—they
discussed funding in the Volksraad. Six hundred thousand additional florins for
the Takalar-Maros tramway, a 72-kilometer line that was supposed to be the
first segment of something bigger. Something that would change everything.
They assigned the project to Bakkers Meyboom, a company
owned by that same Brouerius Meyboom who’d been sniffing around the jungle two
years earlier. The man had a nose for money and a blind spot for common sense—a
combination that works about as well as you’d expect when you’re dancing with
forces that predate your civilization by a few thousand years.
The Hungry Earth
But the jungle had other plans. It always does.
The original Takalar-Maros route got changed to
Takalar-Makassar—45 kilometers instead of 72. They had their reasons, the men
in suits always do. Takalar was under the control of the Gowa Kingdom, they
said, a major supplier of spices and copra and sugar and rice. Strategic value,
they called it. A military axis to counter local rebellions, including one led
by a man named I Tolok Dg Magassing whose name the Dutch probably couldn’t
pronounce but whose anger they understood just fine.
So they handed the project over to a private company—Volker
and Houdjik—because the state-owned Staatspoorwegen didn’t have enough
personnel. Or maybe they were just smart enough to keep their distance from
something that smelled like trouble wrapped in bureaucracy and tied with a bow
made of other people’s money.
Construction began on January 7, 1922. De Nieuwe Courant
reported it would be finished by mid-year, which should have been the first
sign that somebody wasn’t paying attention to the warning signs. In Sulawesi,
as in most places where the earth remembers every drop of blood that’s ever
been spilled on it, deadlines are more like suggestions that reality tends to
ignore.
The Last Supper
July 1, 1922—opening day. Sixty guests showed up for the
ceremony in Sungguminasa, probably thinking they were attending a celebration
instead of a wake. They set up bamboo tents, served cold drinks and sliced
cakes, and listened to speeches about modern transportation and progress and
reclaiming the interior.
Mr. Snethlage, the SS engineer, stood up and talked about
bringing prosperity to isolated communities. He talked about revolution and
progress and the bright future that lay ahead, gleaming like fresh-laid track
stretching into the horizon.
What he didn’t talk about was the cost. What he couldn’t
have known was that they’d built their railway on an appetite that had been
sleeping for centuries, and now they’d gone and rung the dinner bell.
Volker and Houdjik finished the project in a year and a
half—ahead of schedule, miracle of miracles—and earned themselves a
40,000-gulden premium for their trouble. They’d employed 300 local workers,
collaborated with Bugis leaders, and somehow managed to keep the iron flowing
despite shortages that should have killed the project in its cradle.
Eight stops and eleven halts, they built. Fares of 3.20
florins for first-class, 1.20 for third-class from Makassar to Takalar. The
railway was operated by Staatstramwegen op Celebes—STC for short, though the
locals had other names for it, names that didn’t translate well into Dutch or
English or any language spoken by people who still had all their sanity intact.
The Feast Begins
July 1, 1923—they connected the Takalar-Maros line to the
Takalar-Makassar route. More iron, more track, more food for the thing that
lived in the spaces between the rails and the ties. The 1925 encyclopedia Staatspoor
en Tramwegen in Nederlandsch-Indie 1875-1925 documented it all with the
kind of clinical precision that only comes from people who’ve never heard the
sound of metal screaming in the dark.
The most updated route design stretched from Takalar through
Makassar and Maros and Tanette all the way to Parepare and Sengkang. A
beautiful plan on paper, clean lines stretching across a map that didn’t show
the places where the earth was soft with old bones or where the air itself
seemed to whisper warnings in languages that predated the arrival of men with
surveying equipment and delusions of grandeur.
But on November 13, 1926—exactly eleven years to the day
before another November 13 would see the laying of new rail in this same cursed
ground—Ir. A. Tom, Head of the State Railways Survey Division, took a long hard
look at what they’d built and realized they’d made a mistake.
The Takalar tramway was bleeding money like a severed
artery. The planned Makassar-Maros-Sengkang route would be just as financially
unviable, he said, probably more so. Tom proposed an alternative route from
Parepare through Pinrang to Rapang, citing the agricultural wealth of the lake
and lowland areas. Parepare alone yielded 160,000 pikul of rice that year—ten
million kilograms of grain, enough to feed an army or satisfy something with a
considerably larger appetite.
But the alternative route was never built. Maybe Tom was
smart enough to recognize that some hungers can’t be satisfied with rice and
good intentions.
The Second Death
February 26, 1930—the Soerabaijasch Handelsblad
reported that the government approved the closure of the Takalar-Makassar
railway. After eight years of operation, they were pulling the plug. The
Volksraad gave their blessing, and on July 16, 1930, they dismantled the
45-kilometer line at an estimated cost of 100,000 florins.
They ripped up the tracks, scattered the ties, and tried to
erase every trace of their iron mistake. But you can’t undo what’s been done,
especially when what’s been done involved feeding something that should have
been left alone in the first place.
The rails went quiet. The jungle grew back. The locals went
back to their lives, though the smart ones kept their children away from the
places where the old tracks used to run, where the earth was still soft and the
air still carried the echo of something that sounded almost, but not quite,
like the whistle of a train that was never quite train.
The Resurrection
August 18, 2014. Nearly a century later, they decided to
wake the dead.
They called it progress. They called it development. They
called it the future of transportation in Sulawesi, and maybe they even
believed it. Two point one trillion rupiah, most of it from PT Celebes Railway
Indonesia, all of it betting that the past would stay buried and the hungry
thing that lived in the spaces between sleep and waking would be content to go
back to dreaming.
On November 13, 2015—exactly 89 years after Ir. A. Tom filed
his report warning against this very thing—Hermanto Dwiatmoko and Governor
Syahrul Yasin Limpo laid the first rail of the new Makassar-Parepare railway.
They probably thought they were building something new. They
probably told themselves that this time would be different, that they’d learned
from the mistakes of the past, that modern engineering and government
cooperation and business partnerships would be enough to tame whatever had been
sleeping in the Sulawesi earth for the better part of a century.
But in Sulawesi, as in most places where the dead don’t rest
easy and the past refuses to stay buried, some mistakes are just too big to
learn from. Some hungers are just too old to satisfy. And some railways, once
they’ve had a taste of what runs on them, never really stop running—even when
the tracks are gone and the stations are empty and the only passengers are the
ones who paid their fare a long, long time ago and are still waiting for their
train to come home.
The new railway opened, just like they said it would.
Progress marched on, just like it always does. And somewhere in the spaces
between the rails and the ties, in the places where the old track used to run
and the new track runs now, something that had been sleeping for nearly a
century opened one ancient, hungry eye and smiled.
After all, it had been a long time since dinner was served.
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