Sentul - a historic railway town

Neither time nor bomb has destroyed the soul of Sentul.

The B-29 super bombers belonging to the British Forces gave no warning that they were about to drop huge loads of explosives on Kuala Lumpur. In 1945, the bombs simply fell while residents looked on, cheering quietly in their hearts.

Their targets, according to writer John Doraisamy in his article published in Feb 2005 in The Star, were two vital rail complexes managed by Marai Tetsudo, the Japanese name for the former Federated Malay States Railway (FMSR).

The central workshop of Marai Tetsudo — where a wide variety of steam locomotives and passenger coaches were assembled and repaired since 1904 — suffered the most direct hits. Some 72% of the workshop, or over 23ha, was obliterated within a few minutes. This destruction signified what was to be the end of the Japanese Occupation in Malaya.

Property manager Richard Joseph, 65, recalls the momentous occasion as if it just happened.

“My grand-uncle was a station master,” says Joseph. “His job was to come here to check the train schedules every morning. One day, he didn’t come home. We heard that the British had bombed the place. My family came to look for him but all they found was his bicycle.”

I follow his gaze outside where the birds are chirping and the picturesque koi lake is glimmering under the sun. It’s hard to believe that this is where the bombs had rained down and innocent lives were lost.

Almost every week, art enthu-siasts converge in Sentul — at the steely grey monument of KLPac (KL Performance Arts Centre) — regularly to catch the finest performances in the city, oblivious of the history here. They have not met long-time residents like Joseph, whose colourful stories recall a history filled with many milestones — big and small, happy and sad.

Once upon a time, Sentul was the home and workplace of thousands of railway workers, a majority of whom were Indians. It contained the finest integrated engineering workshop in the world, Sentul Works.

In her book, Malayan Railway Administration (1957), Katharine Sim raved, “Sentul makes all the fine new coaches now seen on the track. Railway experts from many countries who have from time to time toured the workshops, were equally amazed to realise that such heavy industry is being done in a primarily agricultural country. Apart from the wheels, axles and a few other proprietary parts which must be imported from overseas, everything else for the coaches, down to the smallest fitting, is made at Sentul Works.”

The workshop was one of the biggest industrial undertakings in Malaya, employing 2,500 people in its heyday, people like Joseph’s grand-uncle and grandfather, former KTM staff Rasu Muthukannu and ex-auxiliary police constable Arul Nathan Gabrial.

Now 80+, Rasu, who still wanders KLPac’s grounds as a gardener, says the city was unrecognisable back then.

“Sentul was not Little India,” he murmurs, partly to himself. “Sentul was India itself.”

Business as usual

In pre-war Sentul, each working day began and ended with a wailing siren. This shrill ringing became the feature that regulated life in those days and still echoes in the minds of every surviving resident today.

“It was for the railway workers but you could hear it for miles around,” says Joseph.

“It woke up the entire town at 6.15am and sounded again at 6.45am to signal that it was time to leave the house. By 4pm, the last siren would ring and that meant it was time to go home.”

The privileged few were able to get around town with a car, but Sentul’s main mode of transport was the ever-reliable bicycle.

“I remember seeing a stream of bicycles every morning,” reminisces Rasu. “People raced from their quarters to the workshops, but there were hardly any accidents.”

For those who wished to travel longer distances, there was always the train service. There was only one station in Sentul, and once a year during Thaipusam, it was filled with hordes of sweaty people hoping to pay tribute to Lord Murugan at Batu Caves.

“Rail travel was a big deal though it wasn’t very comfortable. The ride was very jerky because of the steam engines, and you would always get dust in your eyes because there was no air-conditioning and the windows were left open,” remarks Joseph.

The carriages were divided into three classes: first class was meant for the top officers of KTM, while ordinary citizens like Joseph and his father sat in second class. The third and cheapest class had wooden straight-back seats, but that did not bother Rasu or his family.

“It took 12 hours or more to get from Sentul to Singapore or Penang. We sat on wooden seats the entire way but I guess we were used to it. Besides, it was free for KTM staff,” he says.

Like many other Sentul residents, Muthukannu spent the best years of his life working at the train depot.

“I had to assemble coaches in a proper order,” he remembers. “Each carriage had a number marked into its side with a chalk. Mistakes were bound to happen, especially when it rained.”

Important as his job was, Muthukannu only played a small role in the entire process. Sim — who had taken a tour of Sentul Works at the height of its glory — described the craftsmanship involved in manufacturing a train.

She recorded the existence of “a locomotive-running section”, “a workshop manufacturing small parts”, “a gauge-testing room”, “a small laboratory”, “a big saw mill” (incidentally, where KLPac is) and “a foundry”. But the most fascinating one of all, wrote Sim, was a workshop to restore engines in.

“It’s a pity that we humans cannot have something similar,” she added in jest, after likening the workshop to a “beauty parlour for engines”, where “engines are cleaned in a caustic soda bath, taken to bits, items repaired or renewed, and the whole loco put together again.”

And make no mistake: Indians ruled at Sentul Works, but more than a handful of Chinese and Malays worked there as well.

“It’s just that we specialised in different things,” says Gabrial. “The parts makers and carpenters were mostly Chinese, while the Indians and the Malays were good as metalsmiths, painters and tailors. As men, we got into fights pretty often, but it’s always within our own race.”

With so much going on, it’s not uncommon for employees to skulk around with spare metals under their uniforms, thinking they’d never be caught, according to 61-year-old Gabrial. He was, for a time, one of the 30 or so auxiliary police constables employed by Sentul Works.

“I had to keep a close eye on the staff because, if I didn’t, a lot of valuable parts made from copper and brass would go missing,” he says.

“Some workers would make themselves a bag, stuff it full of metal and try to sneak out. They were always caught red-handed, though.”

After a stint in the security department, Gabrial enrolled in the Pusat Latihan Keretapi (Locomotive Training Centre) to fulfil his ambitions to become a train driver. In 1983, he started out at the bottom of the pack, as a driving assistant for KTMB, transporting goods and passenger to their intended destinations six or seven days a week.

“It’s completely different from driving a car or truck,” he reveals. “There’s no steering wheel, just a throttle. Derailment and collisions occurred from time to time. Breakdowns, too, happened quite often and when they did, I had to strap some explosives onto the tracks as a warning signal. If other trains came my way, I would detonate the explosives and the drivers would slow down because they’d know that there was a stalled train.”

It was also the station master’s responsibility to ensure that trains did not venture onto the same track at the same time, but mistakes did happen.

“There was once I received a signal from the station master to park on a track that was already occupied. Thank goodness I managed to brake in the nick of time,” says Gabrial.

In her book, Sim stated that “drivers are key men, and if they do not work well, or are in any way inefficient, then the timetable breaks down and, if trains are late on a single line, there is chaos.”

A single freak accident could cause a delay of up to 24 hours. Drivers (and passengers, if it was a passenger train) had no choice but to wait for backup, sometimes in the middle of nowhere. In this case, drivers could only hope and pray that help was swiftly on its way.

KTM was eventually privatised in mid-1983 by the prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad and the numbers of workers was scaled back to between 800 and 900 people.

“Most of my friends went back to India and a part of Sentul disappeared with them,” says Gabrial wistfully. “The quarters have been dismantled and replaced with squatter homes — not a very safe place for a girl like you to wander in.”

While life for the residents of this historic railway town may have changed for better or worse since the days of Sentul Works, Joseph says the place holds a special place in many people’s hearts.

“I like the new Sentul,” muses Joseph. “Where else can you see a guy stringing garlands of jasmine in front of his flower shop, with a string of new condos behind him? It’s like the town has come alive again.”