Miners take a smoke break between manually pushing the hopper wagons over the mine's own system, which has no locomotives.

The lower 5km of this railway is electrified, and these diminutive motors shuttle back and forth with coal traffic all day and all night. The rest of the railway is steam worked.

One of 4 daily return scheduled steam-hauled passenger trains on this picturesque Chinese NG coal hauler. Efforts are being made locally to exploit the line's tourist potential.

A Chinese class C2 locomotive on the Shibanxi coal railway, here seen on a globe steam railfan trip to Southern China in March 2006