At one end of the rail yard, mechanics with two-foot-long wrenches fuss lovingly over the workings of a handful of black steam locomotives, while other workers load them up with coal or wipe their huge, cylindrical air compressors clean with large rags.
The men in the old yard seem more like boys, taking turns tooling up and down the tracks under a gray and drizzling sky, blowing off huge white jets of steam and sounding their shrill whistles for no better reason than the sheer fun of it.
The moment lent a special poignancy to their play, for these are the final days of steam on the Jitong railway, a 567-mile line in the province of Inner Mongolia that rail experts say is the last mainline steam-powered railroad anywhere in the world.
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