Phahon Yothin Railway Station - Another One (Literally!) Bit The Dust

Some of my friends are a tad eccentric: some cycle daily like maniacs, a few collect beer labels (& drink it too), and others like to visit every possible railway station that’s around. I enjoy cycling at a leisurely pace, drink an occasional beer and am open to little weird expeditions which always provide photo taking ops…, in other words I fit in well.

Some time ago Tim told me about a visit in 2004 to a small railway station, somewhere behind Chatuchak Park: Phahon Yothin, which probably no longer existed, due to serious construction going on in that area.

This seemed like a perfect kind of ‘mad dogs and Englishmen’ opportunity to check it out. After some discussion we agreed and set off yesterday, meeting point at Chatuchak MRT Station.

We met at a coffee shop at the ‘Good Food - Good Mood - Choose Happy’ underground Metro Mall and 2 Americanos later we started walking past the Children’s Discovery Museum, towards the new express way and worse, the concrete jungle of endless construction and dust…

To prepare ourselves we took a few drinks at a local ‘restaurant’ and discussed our chances of finding anything. We talked the talk and started walking the walk, bumping almost immediately into what was left of the old station building, not much really so we went onwards into Bangsue Rolling Stock Depot.

Parts of the railway track were covered by dirt but still with plenty of disintegrating decrepit railway equipment on it.

The contrast with a nearby new (surprise) building was enormous….

Some of the railway cars should have been in a museum but like at other places (Klong Toey!), for some reason the State Railway prefers to have them moldering away.

However this gave me the opportunity to make an old boy’s dream come true!

In the distance the new Bangsue Station was towering above it all, but Bangkok’s high-rise skyline looked impressive as well.

We walked through a massive new service building with nobody in sight.

In fact as soon as we entered this place we were most of the time happily ignored, only 1 depot building was clearly off limits.

Plans for this train depot area must be huge as the number of new tracks being laid is large.

We hobbled across most of them towards what was left of the old Bangsue Railway Station and rewarded ourselves with a late lunch at one of the food stands, mission (kind of) accomplished!