THEY craned their necks. Some covered their ears.

Excitement showing on their faces, they nudged one another as the T27 rumbled gently into the gleaming concrete Lhasa Railway Station.

Their brows arched as they smiled and waved, at no one in particular.

On the other side of the double-glazed ultraviolet light-proof windows, some of us waved back.

The inquisitive Tibetans on Platform One had travelled from as far away as 270km and paid the one-yuan (20 Singapore cents) entry fee simply to admire the handsome, 15-carriage, pine-green and yellow-striped metal caterpillar - the Beijing-Lhasa Express.

Saucer-eyed, they took in their first sight of the train called huo che in Mandarin. Such vehicles are so unfamiliar to the Tibetans that they had no words for them until the Chinese government published a list of 28 train-related terms in their language in June, ahead of the trains' launch on July 1.

As they watched, the 900 mainly Chinese tourists and workers on board grabbed their trolley bags and filed out of the oxygen-supplied, pressurised capsule to take their first breath of the high-altitude, low-oxygen air of Lhasa.

I strapped on my backpack as well and stepped out onto the platform, relieved and yet regretting the end of the 48-hour, 4,064km ride across China on the world's highest railroad.

The new train has attracted much controversy.

Tibetan exile communities and their foreign supporters say it will steamroll over Tibetans and cause 'cultural genocide' while the Chinese government says it will bring economic development and higher living standards to one of the most isolated, poorest parts of the country.

I was bemused to see the Tibetans who had come all the way to gape at the train. What did they think of it, I wondered.

Were they like the beaming Tibetans shown by the state-run media draping white hada scarves of blessing on the brand-new tracks? Or were they vexed about the railway's entry into holy Lhasa, and the inexorable tide of Chinese influence that will follow?

These questions were probably not on the minds of the excited Chinese tourists that I had climbed on board with two nights earlier, at Beijing West Station.

BLUE clipboards in hand, the inspectors came down the row of grey metal seats in the waiting room.

They held our palm-size tickets up against the light - as if they were dollar bills - and asked: 'How much handling fees did you pay?' before letting us get in a haphazard queue to board the train.

Tibet travel fever is raging. The new railway has spawned a black market for the hottest train ticket in town. Tourists are paying agents as much 4,000 yuan for the two-day Beijing-Lhasa ride.

That's twice the 2,000 yuan or so they would pay for the four-hour flight from Beijing to Lhasa.

As a Beijing tour operator put it: 'Right now, everyone just wants to know the feeling, the experience of riding the train into Lhasa.'

Mr You Junwei was one of the five holidaymakers in my cabin in carriage 14.

As the train, made by Chinese-Canadian joint venture Bombardier Sifang Power Transportation, began moving at the scheduled 9.30pm with barely a jolt, the book editor from Tianjin gave the carriage a once-over and declared it 'gao ji!' (high quality).

It was indeed plush. Our 'hard sleeper' cabin had two sets of three-tier beige velvet-covered bunks. The carriage had tourist-friendly touches: Tibetan motifs inscribed on the glass doors, fluffy brown carpet floor and a yellow digital ticker tape display telling us the current velocity and outside temperature.

At the end of each carriage were a pair of sparkling clean silver squat toilets and three wash basins with signs in Tibetan, Chinese and English.

There were power sockets for the Chinese tourists toting iPods, latest-model camcorders, digital cameras and mobile phones.

Equipped with Goretex trekking boots, thermos flasks of Chinese tea and altitude-sickness pills, most of the passengers aboard the Beijing-Lhasa Express were heading to the holy land for the first time in their lives.

Retired businessman Liu Daolong, 58, was on his first vacation with his wife - a 14,000-yuan, 10-day trip that had taken them years to save up for.

The last long train ride he recalled most vividly - though not fondly - was the one that took him from his home in Tianjin to Inner Mongolia as a 17-year-old Red Guard 'sent down' to create a Socialist paradise in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s.

He was now off to see another Shangri-La.

'I hear Tibet is like an inscrutable book. The people and culture there are not swayed by progress and development. They're not materialistic. They are centred in their own world.

'I've been wanting to go and see for myself. It's so convenient now with the train,' he explained as he pulled on his pyjamas to get ready for bed.

10.30pm. Lights out. As the train rumbled on softly, occasional snores and the stench of sweaty feet filtered through the cabins.

Outside, light raindrops skidded off the train's shell.

We were hurtling through the darkness, 320km south to Hebei's capital, Shijiazhuang. Velocity: 107kmh. Outside temperature: 22 deg C.

THE train delivers about 4,000 passengers from various Chinese cities to Lhasa's door every day now.

If our train were a good gauge, most are Chinese tourists and migrant workers - who previously would have had to fly or take a two-day, 1,140km bone-rattling road trip from the frontier town of Golmud in Qinghai.

The Qinghai-Tibet railway, says Beijing, will enable a tourism-driven boom in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) and its neighbouring province, Qinghai, where the new US$4.2 billion (S$6.58 billion) high-altitude track starts.

The numbers arriving to see the awe-inspiring Potala Palace, the sacred Jokhang Monastery and holy lakes in Tibet are set to climb 15 to 20 per cent per year, hitting 2.5 million in 2010 and six million in 2020, according to the state news agency Xinhua.

According to official figures, 1.8 million tourists visited Tibet last year and spent 1.93 billion yuan.

By early 2008 - in time for the Beijing Olympics - well-heeled travellers can also take a US$1,000-a-day, five-day journey on the Tangula Express, the Beijing-Lhasa luxury train replete with butlers, private bathrooms, satellite TV and broadband.

Cranes are already a common sight around Lhasa, with hotels, apartments and shops springing up.

This week, the authorities proudly announced that more than 270,700 passengers - and 37,400 tonnes of cargo - have been transported on the line.p> The track, said to be one of the most expensive railways in the world, is a central plank of Beijing's 'Develop the West' strategy - instituted in 1999 to help the remote western reaches of China catch up with the more prosperous East.

'The railway connects Tibet firmly to Motherland'

The railway will carry more goods at a lower cost into Tibet, says Beijing. Two daily freight trains will help lower the hurdles that businesses face in Tibet: high transport costs and inaccessibility.

For the Tibetan in the street, that should mean cheaper, more diverse daily necessities. Coffee and bread are expected to become as common as the staple yak butter tea and tsampa (roasted barley flour).

And naturally, a rail network will also help the Chinese tap - some say exploit - Tibet's wealth of minerals: copper, lithium, uranium, chromium and iron.

IF THOSE sums still do not add up to offset the hefty investment, there are other calculations to consider.

The awe-inspiring railway is a 'political investment', Mr Liu observed over his breakfast of instant noodles as we raced past smog-covered towns, mud-brown peaks and sunflowers.

We were speeding towards Xi'an, the second of six major towns we would stop at en route.

'The railway connects Tibet firmly to the zhu guo (motherland),' he said.

An umbilical cord of concrete and steel, I thought.

Beijing wants restive western frontiers such as Xinjiang and Tibet with 'separatist' tendencies bound to the Motherland, for the all-important Chinese Communist Party (CCP) goal of 'stability'.

Having a railway network also makes for easier troop movement - to augment the already highly visible military and gong an (public security) presence in Tibet, which shares a disputed border with India, say Chinese and Western academics.

Critics of the new railway warn about another type of movement: that of the majority ethnic Han Chinese into Tibet.

Since the 1980s, workers and fortune-seekers of all stripes have been drawn to Tibet by the incentives and higher wages in the otherwise inhospitable land.

The flavour of Lhasa had already been changed, with 'Authentic Sichuan taste' eateries on many street corners.

The long-running quarrel over migration may get louder with the opening of the rail route.

At one end of the line, critics argue that Tibetans are being crowded out - literally and in economic opportunities - in their own land.

At the other end, the Chinese government points to official statistics which show that ethnic Tibetans make up more than 90 per cent of the TAR's population of 2.7 million. (Han Chinese soldiers and short-term migrant workers are not counted in the census.)

IN THE sardine-packed third-class 'hard seat' section, I saw why it was not difficult for the common man in Tibet to worry about a Han Chinese influx.

In the ramrod-straight cushioned seats, three on one side, two on the other, were a sea of Chinese passengers, and the odd Hui Muslim or Mongolian ones. Their canvas suitcases, twine-bound cardboard boxes and bulging satchels had been stored overhead.

There were a few bespectacled, backpack-laden university students leafing through their 'Qinghai-Tibet railway special edition' China Geographic magazines. But most of the other scruffier-looking travellers were swigging cans of beer or slurping cups of instant noodles.

The pungence of Sichuan mala (spicy) soup and chatter filled the carriage. Some passengers rested their heads on the white cotton tablecloth, trying to sleep in the fluorescent-lit brightness.

Two sisters from Sichuan played cards with new-found friends in carriage 10. The older one, a blonde-streaked beauty salon owner, wore a red Beijing Olympics 2008 cap she had picked up on her first trip to the capital to buy the one-way 389-yuan 'hard seat' tickets.

They were going to meet some Sichuan friends who had set up a clothing store in Tingri (Dingre), near the border with Nepal, and perhaps do some business there.

The Qinghai-Tibet railroad had brought their Tibet dream within reach.

The older sister said: 'We could never afford to fly there. Now, we're just going to kao cha, kao cha ('check things out') till the end of the year.

'We want to sell clothes to Han Chinese there. And some younger Tibetans are beginning to dress like us, you know.'

She saw fertile, virgin ground in Tibet's rugged, treeless tundra.

As did another Sichuan native - a pencil-thin young woman with a long plait, who had got on board with several other passengers at Qinghai's capital, Xining, when we arrived there at around 7pm.

She had just quit her production line job in a Zhejiang clothes factory and planned to join her older sister, who had rushed out to Lhasa on one of the first trains in July. 'She wants to start a fan dian (guesthouse). I'm going to help her. Go there for a look,' she said.

Ms Wang Yu, 32, from Inner Mongolia, had something more concrete lined up.

'Salaries are high in Tibet. I want to send my daughter overseas to study'

She had left her husband, 10-year-old daughter and newsvendor stall behind to work as a construction supervisor on a new road project in Lhundrub (Lingzhi), 65km north-west of Lhasa.

Tibet 'should be a beautiful land with blue skies and sunshine, and where locals don't bathe very often', she said.

'Salaries are higher in Tibet. I want to send my daughter overseas to study,' said Ms Wang, pulling down her suitcase to fish out a passport-size photo of her rosy-cheeked child.

Just as it drew pilgrims, mystical Tibet seemed a promised land for Chinese fortune-seekers.

DAY TWO. 5.45am. Lying on my bunk, I lifted the stiff white lace curtains for a peek. Yesterday's chiselled mountains had given way to a flat nothingness that stretched into the horizon, meeting a layered orange-pink-yellow-blue sky.

In the grey half-light, I could not tell if it was sand, salt or snow that we were cutting across.

This was the desert industrial town of Golmud, 2,830m above sea level.

I brushed my teeth and felt adrenaline flowing in my veins, mixing with the altitude-sickness pill, Diamox, I had popped.

'Put on something warm,' a train steward instructed as he walked past. Outside temperature: 11 deg C, said the ticker tape.

This was the real start of the journey. At Golmud, the train hooked onto three American-made General Electric locomotives - for the long haul up to altitudes of over 5,000m.

We crawled past a line of oil tankers and freight cars queued on a parallel railway track, and ground to a halt.

Stepping off, the cool morning air hit my cheeks. With a few other nosy travellers, I raced down the length of the train to catch the white locomotives coming down the orange-lit track to meet our train. Workers shone their torches to make sure the carriages were properly fastened.

We were now ready for the world's highest railway.

Before its completion in October last year, the Peruvian railway in the Andes had that honour. Now, hitting 5,072m above sea level at its highest point, the Qinghai-Tibet railway is at least 200m higher than Peru's.

No better symbol of China having arrived in the world.

At the railway's nationally televised official opening in Golmud on July 1 - coinciding with the 85th anniversary of the CCP's founding - Chinese President Hu Jintao said: 'We have the courage, confidence and ability to stand among the world's advanced nations.'

Mr Hu, a trained engineer and CCP party secretary in Tibet from 1988 to 1992, no doubt appreciated the full meaning of the achievement.

China had come a long way to make those world-beating boasts.

It was a latecomer to the train. Even after the Industrial Revolution had taken off in Europe, late Qing dynasty Chinese thought railways were disruptive to the harmony of nature and man. By 1896, China had only 595km of railway track while the United States had 292,900km, Britain 33,796km and Japan 3,700km.

The rail link to Tibet had been dreamt up in 1919 by the founder of the Chinese Republic Sun Yat-Sen, whose grand vision for modernising China included a direct rail link all the way to Capetown in South Africa. In 1950, the People's Liberation Army marched into Tibet, which was formally incorporated into the People's Republic the year after. Then-CCP chairman Mao Zedong also clamoured for a railroad to the 'roof of the world' - to bind Tibet to China.

Roads proved easier than rail. On Christmas Day 1954, trucks drove into Lhasa on the Qinghai-Tibet and Sichuan-Tibet highways which are still trunk roads to inland China today.

Even as history marched on, there was nothing inevitable about this railway that hopes to haul Tibet onto the path to progress.

The track we had travelled on up to Golmud had been in use since 1984. But construction of the 1,142km extension to Lhasa had been stalled because of technical.'

DOWN in Gangtok, the state capital, Chief Minister Chamling is unfazed by the hesitancy that New Delhi is showing towards a more rapid expansion of ties with China.

'Within five years, I expect the Nathu La to be a full-fledged trade route wie current railhead 120km away in New Jalpaiguri, West Bengal state.

Tourist numbers are also rising. Ten years ago, Sikkim barely got 60,000 visitors in a year. Last year, the state saw 30il - that 'the Kunlun Range is a guarantee that the railway wissage is that it is a shining example that border states can indeed be peaceful and completely integrated with the heartland.

Sikkim shares land borders with three nations - Nepal, Bhutan and China. Yet, for a state that joined the Indian Union only od, and small processions of schoolchildren celebrating the day. s sticking out of the ground along parts of the track, the train's pre-recorded Mandarin and English audio commentary told us about the combination of methods thway from it. Otherwise we cannot survive.'

From my window seat, it was somewhat surreal to see tunnels, bridges and platforms of steel and concrete riveted to rugged mountains.

The commanding stone monuments, stout and functional but not particularly beautiful, were a celebration of Man's triumph over Nature - for now.

Barely a month after the first commercial trains rolled across, the Railway Ministry reported cracks in the track's foundation and bridge structures, causing them to sink in some sections.

Chinese permafrost engineers had done their sums assuming there would be a 2 deg C change over 100 years. Global warming could wreck those calculations within a decade and chalk up a crippling maintenance bill, or worse.

For now, the ministry has said it would step up monitoring and maintenance work.

NONE of that worried us as we gasped collectively at the sight of endangered Tibetan antelopes when the train traversed the chilly, 45,000 sq km Kekexili Nature Reserve, home to 230 species of wild animals. Everyone whipped out digital cameras, hoping to snap an antelope, wild horse or yak.

Past Yuzhu Peak station, rays of light perforated clouds, casting giant moving shadows on mossy green-brown slopes which grew skyward into jet-white peaks.

Air this high up has about half the oxygen content of air at sea level. We watched out for the headaches, dizziness, nose bleeds and nausea that signal altitude sickness, which can turn fatal if the body does not acclimatise over time.

Oxygen-enriched air had started flowing through the train's carriages as soon as we left Golmud. Smoking on board was banned. Now, a few green-faced passengers started reaching for the thin oxygen tubes that had been put out earlier that morning.

In a 'hard seat' carriage, a man walked through the narrow aisle balancing a silver bowl of vomit. Some women breastfed their infants, and men shaved or played cards unperturbed. An old woman lay in her 'hard sleeper' bunk, complaining of a fever.

A man in a white coat and two assistants carrying what looked like a blood pressure meter hurried down the corridor.

As we climbed to over 4,500m, I lost my China Mobile phone signal for a while and my digital camera stopped working once.

'Sky road men, oh beloved sky road men...'

Overhead, a woman serenaded us with a high-pitched tune about the magnificent grassland. A male vocalist sang odes to the Kunlun mountains we were taking in and the Tangula range we would soon meet.

'Sigh, how many railway workers do you think died building this tian lu (sky road)?', Mr Liu wondered aloud.

In the frigid and treacherous conditions, the construction of the Qinghai-Tibet highway - much of which runs parallel to this rail track - in the early 1950s had claimed one life almost every kilometre.

This time around, with 600 doctors and nurses scattered at clinics every 10km along the line, no workers died from altitude sickness, according to reports by state news agency Xinhua. They did not mention death from other causes.

But the railway's chief operations director Zhang Xiqing recently revealed that 14,500 workers and engineers had to be hospitalised for altitude sickness, with 3,500 in 'critical' condition. A 76-year-old Hong Kong man who took the train also died of altitude sickness last month. I thought of the musical eulogy that played in the food car the night before, as I swallowed my stir-fried pork with long beans.

'Sky road men, oh beloved sky road men...' the soprano repeated her shrill chorus. Exuberant workers burst onto the 30-inch, flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. They planted red flags on barren ground and punched the air upon finishing a stretch of railroad.

It was a palpable pride. Banners proclaimed 'Warmly celebrate the successful opening of the Qingzang Railway' from the top of a building in Xining. The local Xinhua bookstore there - as I saw on my return leg - had stacks of books on Tibet and the railway as its centrepiece display, merely a tier beneath the just-published Selected Works Of Jiang Zemin.

A taxi driver in Golmud later told me: 'I drove a client 300km west of Golmud just to see the railway track. I felt so proud and emotional when we saw it. It must have been so tough on the workers.'

While on our train, Zi Yan, a 12-year-old from Hebei, got the chance to thank one of them.

Past Tangula Station, the highest in the world at 5,068m, we stopped for a good 20 minutes to wait for the train in the opposite direction to pass.

Sweater-clad railroad workers were resting by the tracks. A tanned, wiry man jumped across and approached our capsule with a smile.

'Are you Tibetan?' the girl gesticulated as she flashed the question in large Chinese characters on a piece of paper plastered against the window.

The man shook his head. Wielding his right arm, he traced two characters in the air as he mouthed them: 'Qing Hai'.

'You're heroic (hen wei da) for building this railroad! It must have been hard on you. Thank you!' Zi Yan scribbled and flashed her note in gratitude.

He grinned and nodded as we pulled away.

BY THIS time, we understood why this was truly a 'sky road'. On the world's highest plateau, the peaks in the distance could look like versions of the 166m Bukit Timah Hill.

It was the clouds cuddling the peaks - and an altitude meter at the end of each carriage - that reminded us this was the roof of the world, with peaks thundering 6,000m or more into the sky.

A man in the next cabin cried out: 'Wah say, I feel like I'm entering heaven.'

A woman squealed from the other end of the carriage: 'This is like riding into the sky. We're on mountains higher than the clouds.'

In the late afternoon sun, orange-rimmed clouds hung in blue skies on the right side of the train. On the left, grey, pregnant ones loomed over green slopes. In the distance, fuzzy, slow-motion sprays had already erupted from one cloud. Silver streams slithered down from the peaks' white carpets, pulling us closer to the heart of the Land of the Snows.

I wanted to hop off the train to meet the families living in those flat-roofed brown stone houses, to smell the yak dung smoke floating out of their chimneys, to run around the white chorten (stupas) at the edge of fields, to get up close with the grimy-faced children barely taller than the yaks and horses they were herding.

I wanted to know what this train, cutting across their land, would bring to them.

I would have to wait. For now, all I saw were friendly waves as we zoomed past, and bewildered smiles as we pulled in at Lhasa's Platform One.

Highest, longest, an engineering marvel

WORLD'S HIGHEST RAILWAY

• Most (960km) of the Qinghai-Tibet railway's tracks are at 4,000m above sea level.
• Highest point: 5,072m, beating the Peruvian railway in the Andes by at least 200m.
• World's highest railway station: Tangula Station, at 5,068m above sea level.

WORLD'S LONGEST PLATEAU RAILWAY

• Stretches 1,956km from Xining, the capital of Qinghai province, to Tibetan capital Lhasa.
• Cost: US$4.2 billion (S$6.6 billion).
• Work on the first section - from Xining to Golmud in Qinghai - began in 1958 and was completed in 1984.
• The 1,142km stretch from Golmud to Lhasa was stalled for years, because of technical and financial difficulties.
• Work restarted in June 2001 and the track was completed last October.
• The first commercial trains rolled across on July 1.

ENGINEERING CHALLENGE

About half of the new stretch (550km) is built on permafrost, which becomes unstable if it thaws. Chinese engineers found the following ways to keep the ground cool:

• The track is elevated at some parts, to allow cold air to flow below the track and cool the ground.
• Ventilation pipes are placed on other parts of the track.
• Thermal bars - 15cm wide and 7m long - are stuck into the ground 2m apart, along some of the railway. They are filled with liquid ammonia to channel heat to the top of the bars for dispersion.
• Sun shades.
• Stone embankments, which create pockets to retain cool air.

ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGE

The Chinese government spent 1.54 billion yuan (S$308 million) on environmental protection measures.

• In the Kekexili Nature Reserve, which the train traverses, 33 underpasses were built specially for migrating animals to get across the railway.
• Trash and waste water from the trains are compacted and disposed of in Golmud or Lhasa.

EXTENSIONS

• China has announced plans to extend the railway to Tibet's second-largest city of Shigatse (Rikeze), 270km south-west of Lhasa, within three years.
• Another line may stretch from Lhasa to Dromo (Yadong), a town which borders India, within 10 years. It may be linked up with India's railway network via the recently reopened Nathu La Pass on the Sino-Indian border.
• Chinese officials say the railway will be extended to the Nepali border.