Hidden Unseen

Gyermekvasút - The Children’s Railways of Soviet Russia in Budapest

In the outskirts of Budapest, through the scenic Buda hills, run a short, narrow-gauge railway line called Gyermekvasút, which is Hungarian for “Children's Railway”. But Gyermekvasút is not a toy train commonly found in amusement parks. It’s a real railway line with real stations, real diesel locomotives pulling real coaches, and running on a real schedule. The “Children” here are not the passengers. They are the railway workers.

The Children's Railway is staffed and run mostly by pre-adolescent kids aged between 10 to 14, under adult supervision, of course. Only the driving and maintenance stuff are done by adults. All other jobs, from checking and issuing tickets, operating signals, making announcements and giving information to passengers, are performed by young people dressed in immaculate official uniforms complete with all the appropriate paraphernalia.

Young railway employees of Children's Railway, Minsk.

The Children's Railway is a relic of the communist era, built at a time when the Young Pioneers movement was in full force. The Young Pioneers was a youth movement of the Communist Party, similar to the Scouts movement of the Western world, where young people learned skills of social cooperation and attended publicly funded summer camps. The early Young Pioneers were originally Scouts who took the Bolsheviks' side after the October Revolution of 1917. Many Scouts, however, resisted the communists and fought in the ranks of the White Army and interventionists against the Red Army during the Russian Civil War of 1917-1921. After communism got a firm hold over the country, the Scouting system was eradicated and replaced by the ideologically different Young Pioneer organization to properly educate children with Communist teachings.

The Children's Railway, sometimes also called the Pioneer Railway, was a project of the Young Pioneers where teenagers and children learned the railway profession. They were established all across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe where communism had its presence. The first opened in Gorky Park, Moscow, in 1932. The one in Budapest, the Gyermekvasút, opened in 1948. By the time the USSR broke up, there were over 50 such railways and many more across the Eastern Bloc. Many Pioneer Railways are still in use today functioning as heritage railways as well as tourist attractions. Aside from the one in Budapest, surviving examples are found in Minsk, Dresden, Berlin, Belarus, Tbilisi and a host of other cities.

The Gyermekvasút in Budapest is 11.2 km long and goes through seven stops, all popular recreation spots. To work on the railway children undergo 4 months of training and sit exams in all areas of railway management before receiving a one-year license. Children work once or twice a fortnight, rotating the tasks, so that they can fit their duties around attendance at school. They are even permitted to miss school while working on the railway. Working on the Gyermekvasút is a privilege, and young Hungarians look forward to it.

The Children's Railway in Budapest.

A young officer of the Minsk Children’s Railway.

Signalman at the Children's Railway.

The Children's Railway in Minsk.

A signalman at the Children's Railway in Budapest.

A young worker at the Children's Railway in Budapest.

A young worker at the Children's Railway in Budapest

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Thermogenesis Phenomenon

Between late February and May, in woodlands and wetlands throughout eastern Canada and the northeast United States, you’ll find a low growing, foul-smelling plant called skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus). The skunk cabbage is one of the first plants to emerge in the spring when the winter snow is yet to melt. As the plant pokes its head out of the snow and starts flowering, it forms a small pool of water around it, created by snow melt. The heat needed to melt the snow is derived not from the sun but generated by the plant itself. Skunk cabbage is one of the few species in the Plant Kingdom, belonging to ancient lineages of flowering plants, that has the rare ability to generate heat — a phenomenon known as thermogenesis.

The flower of a skunk cabbage melts snow around it by its heat.

Thermogenic plants are found in a variety of families, but Araceae in particular contains many such species. Skunk cabbage, the dead-horse arum, the elephant yam and Philodendron selloum, are a few examples of thermogenic plants belonging to the Araceae family. These plants can generate significant amounts of heat that even mammals can’t, and their rate of heat production actually increases the colder the environment gets.

In an experiment, skunk cabbages were found to maintain flower temperature 9°C higher when the air temperature was at 15°C. When the air temperature was dropped to –15°C, the flower was still at 15°C, or 30° higher than the air temperature.

The Asian sacred lotus (Nelumbo nucifera) can also regulate its flower temperature. Measurements showed that flower temperatures stayed at a warm 30°C to 36°C even when environmental temperatures dropped as low as 10°C. Another species Philodendron selloum is even better at temperature regulation. In lab tests, the flowers managed to stay between 30°C and 36°C even when scientists chilled the air to 4°C.

The dead horse arum (Helicodiceros muscivorus), another obnoxious smelling plant, reportedly produces more heat than any other known plant or animal considered in its entirety.

Knowledge of heat generating plants date back more than 200 years but it’s only recently researchers have started to unravel the biochemistry behind it. It’s now know that the heat is generated in the mitochondria, as a secondary process of cellular respiration, although the actual process is still poorly understood.

Biologists believe thermogenic plants generate heat to assist in pollination. The heat renders the flower’s fragrance more volatile which helps the scent to spread more widely so that pollinating insects can find them from far away. The dead horse arum, which smells like rotten meat, uses heat not only to attract flies and beetles but also to convince them that it’s a dead carcass. The heat also makes the thermogenic plants attractive to insects seeking warmth and comfort.

But a flower that offers pollinators just a sip of nectar or a snack of pollen and then sends them on their way has a better chance of dispersing its pollens than a flower that traps insects for a whole night by its hospitality. This is why thermogenesis is not commonly seen among plants. During evolution these heat generating species died out and were replaced by plants having better pollination methods.

The dead-horse arum. This flower has the fragrance of a rotting carcass.

Skunk cabbages blooming in the forest.

Skunk cabbage breaking through the ice.

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The Tree of Life in Kalaloch

There is an extraordinary tree in Kalaloch beach, within Olympic National Park in Washington, that some people call “the tree of life” because of the miraculous way it seems to be hanging on to life when it should have been dead years ago. The tree is located just north of Kalaloch Lodge, near the Kalaloch Campground, on a cliff that has partially caved in due to erosion — right under the tree. The tree is anchored to the ground by only a few tendrils of roots, but the majority of them are exposed and spread out over a void. It’s a miracle that the tree is still breathing and thriving and sprouting fresh green leaves every spring despite having no soil underneath. No one knows why the tree has not toppled over during the intense storms that the coast is known for.

The tree is a Sitka spruce, but there is no official name. So people have been calling it by various names such as “the tree of life” and “the runaway tree”. Underneath the tree, is a cave like hollow that some people call “the tree root cave”. I couldn’t find how old the tree is or for how long it is hanging there for dear life.

The cave under the tree was caused by a small stream that empties into the ocean and has been washing the soil out from underneath it. I gather that this happened many decades ago, as can be inferred from this passage I read at lubin-king.com, written in 2005:

As we approached the tree, a couple that was walking towards the bluff commented that they had been coming to this campground for 17 years and each year they had been expecting the tree to fall, but it hadn’t happened yet.

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Unexploded Bombs Find Everyday Use in Laos

The Vietnam War ended 40 years ago, but left a deadly legacy, especially in Laos. The US military dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on the country during the war between 1964 and 1973, making Laos the most heavily bombed country in the world on a per capita basis. There were more than 580,000 bombing missions on Laos, equivalent to one bombing mission every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. Not all of those bombs did what they were supposed to do. An estimated 30 percent of ordnance failed to explode, remaining live in the ground years after the war. They continue to detonate at unexpected places and at unexpected times, such as when children are playing.

Boats made from bomb casings seen in a village in Laos.

A major cause of casualties, however, is villagers attempting to open the big bombs to sell the metal and the explosives inside to scrap dealers. A high quality bomb casing weighing up to 2,000 pounds can fetch more than $100. Empty bomb casings that once contained deadly explosives are visible all across the country in new forms — from hollowed out canoes and containers, to props holding houses above flood.

When photographer Mark Watson took a bicycle trip across the country, he was surprised to see these lethal devices being reused in extraordinary ways. “Scrap from such widespread bombing has been utilized in people’s homes and villages,” Watson said, “for everything from house foundations to planter boxes to buckets, cups and cowbells.”

Gathering bomb scraps is a deadly occupation, but the people were forced into the trade by poverty.

"Lots of agricultural land is denied to people because of the presence of UXO (unexploded ordnance), and this is the main problem. It prolongs poverty because people can't do what they need to do. If they know that UXO is present, they will not plow deeply enough to get a good quality crop," said David Hayter, of Mines Advisory Group (MAG), an NGO working to detect and remove mines and bombs.

But progress is slow and their budget limited. Meanwhile, people continue to get killed and injured by accidental detonation of live ordnance. As of 2012, at least 29,000 people have died from such accidents.

Children pose near unexploded bombs recovered from around the village.

A house in village uses a bomb casing as a garden decoration.

Bomb casing used as a flower pot.

Bomb casings used to prop up a house.

Bomb casings as water container.

Metal recovered from bomb casing shaped into cow bells.

Bomb casings used to prop up houses.

A bomb casing turned into a boat.

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Ancient Roman City With a Very Modern Grid Design

The ruins of Timgad lies on the slopes of the Aures Massif, about 35 km east of the town of Batna, in modern-day Algeria. Built nearly 2,000 years ago, by the Roman Emperor Trajan, the city is laid out in great precision and is one of the best surviving examples of the grid plan used by the ancient Roman city planners.

The city was originally founded as a military colony by the emperor Trajan around AD 100, intended to serve as a bastion against the Berbers in the nearby Aures Mountains. It’s original residents were largely Parthian veterans of the Roman army who were granted lands in return for years of service.

The city’s original design was a perfect square, 355 meters long on each side, with an orthogonal design highlighted by the decumanus maximus (east-west-oriented street) and the cardo (north–south-oriented street) lined by a partially restored Corinthian colonnade. The plan was to provide space for 15,000 residents, but the city quickly outgrew that number and spilled beyond the orthogonal grid in a more loosely but organized fashion. The city grew for the next 300 years as new quarters were added to the original ground plan leading to a quadrupling of the original size.

During its second and third century, the city enjoyed a peaceful existence. Perfectly located at the head of the Oued el-Abiod and a crucial junction, it gave Romans control of one of the main passes through the Aurès Mountains, and therefore of access to and from the Sahara. Starting from the 3rd century, it became a center of Christian activity, and a Donatist center in the 4th century. Timgad fell into decline after the Vandal invasion in the 5th century and the subsequent sacking by Berbers.

The city was revived in the 6th century under the Byzantine Emperor Justinian. A fortress was built outside the original town and many blocks from earlier Roman buildings were reused. But the city fell once again to an Arab invasion in the 7th century. The site was finally abandoned in the 8th century. The city was forgotten until it was excavated from under the sand in 1881.

All these centuries lying under the sand of the Sahara, Timgad remained exceptionally well preserved. At the west end of the decumanus maximus still stands a 12-meters-high triumphal arch, called the Arch of Trajan, which was partially restored in 1900. There a temple dedicated to Jupiter that is of approximately the same dimensions as the Pantheon in Rome. A large Byzantine citadel stands to the southeast of the city. There is also a 3,500-seat theater in good condition, a library, a basilica and four public bath houses.

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