Michael Batson

On a recent trip to Kampot I got talking one day at lunch to an expat retired railway engineer. He was telling me about the train service to Kampot and how this was worth doing once. “If you do it twice it’s probably a reminder you should have only done it once” he quipped. He said the service was a railcar that hailed originally from Mexico. A railcar is a self-powered carriage as opposed to carriages pulled by a separate engine, like a locomotive. His story piqued my interest as I’d often thought of taking the train, something I’ve never done in Cambodia. I’ve taken trains before in Southeast Asia; in Thailand a few times, Indonesia, and in Vietnam, but never in the Kingdom of Wonder.My frequent trips to Kampot were only by road; either by bus or sometimes I’d ride my motorbike. I enjoy riding, but the bus though it’s a relatively short trip, can still be a chore. Road travel is slow; four hours from Phnom Penh to Kampot though it’s barely 150kms distance (to be fair one trip only took three hours). Vehicles are forced to travel at the pace of the slowest road users, often overloaded motorbikes performing some freight function, or carrying five people, or drivers who just seem to crawl along at a snail’s pace for no apparent reason whatsoever.Finally, I bit the bullet and decided to buy a train ticket. I looked online. There were timetables, prices, and seating configurations. I looked for the railcar. The retired engineer told me this had a one-one configuration