Goobie’s Great Train Hunt gained momentum this weekend when his grandparents joined us for a search of Morphou Bay.

The Cyprus Government Railway used to run 76 miles from Famagusta to Evrychou until it closed in 1951. Goobie recently found ‘Mr No. 1 Train’ in Famagusta and he visited the old station at Evrychou. We’d hoped to see a mine train at the huge Skouriotissa mine, but we had to turn back at the Argentinian UN camp. So today, we crossed the border at Astromeritis hoping for more luck further along the line in Northern Cyprus.

We’d read online that we may have train sightings in the Morphou Bay area, particularly around the mining villages of Lefka and Xeros (near Karyotis on the map above). But those web pages dated back to 2004 and we had no idea whether the trains would still be there.

‘We will try our hardest to find them, Goobie, but they might have gone,’ we warned him.

We drove through Morphou (Turkish name Guzelyurt) and headed left for Xeros (Gemikonagi) along the coast road. The village seemed run down and there were old slag heaps to one side of the road and a rusting jetty on the other. We’d read that an engine called Tid could be found behind the café next to the jetty. But we saw nothing apart from a big rusty boat beached on the shore. We drove on in search of Tid and another jetty.

A couple of kilometres along the road we came to Karavostasi and a huge old jetty stretching into the sea. In front of the jetty were derelict warehouses with loading equipment. Surely we’d find Tid here? We jumped out of the car and set off to explore.

We looked through the broken windows of a warehouse and thought we saw a rusty rail. Convinced we’d find Tid around the next corner, we carried on.

‘Doesn’t seem very healthy around here, does it?’ remarked Matt looking at the piles of waste material around us.

I took a closer look. The stuff on the ground was yellowy and white. It looked toxic. And I was certain there was a scratchy feeling at the back of my throat.

‘Enjoying a bit of asbestos poisoning?’ I laughed. That joke would come back to haunt me.

We discovered that this was an ancient port, used by the Cyprus Mining Corporation (CMC) as a processing and exporting centre for copper and asbestos. When the island was divided in 1974, it closed because the mine was on one side of the Green Line and the jetty on the other. However the slag piles remained. Were we walking through asbestos? Were the Turkish signs at the entrance actually warning that the place was toxic? Had our innocent outing doomed us to the hazards of asbestos exposure? I was particularly scared for Goobie and we got out of there quickly.

In a panic, I did some research. I now know more about asbestos than I’d like to. Apparently, the mining waste has caused serious environmental and health hazards, from air-borne dust and chemicals leeching into the water. However I found nothing about asbestos pollution here. The asbestos mine was in Amiantos in Troodos and is the focus of an impressive restoration project to clean up the area.

Thankfully, we were just standing next to old piles of ore.

We continued down to the sea and the enormous jetty. There was a pair of rusty rails underneath it. But no Tid.

We got in the car and drove back to the other jetty in Xeros. Perhaps we just hadn’t looked hard enough. I checked what it said online again.

‘It says, behind the café is an old tug called Tid,’ I read.

‘Tug?!’ exclaimed my father-in-law. ‘A tug is a boat, not a train.’

Damn my nautical ignorance.

We looked at the big rusty boat behind the café. So we had found Tid.

Goobie took it well that Tid was a boat and not an engine. She had TID 154 LONDON on her hull and was an oil-burning steam tug, used to pull barges for CMC. She rests exactly where she was left when the Turkish invaded in 1974. She was built at Chatham Dockyard in 1945 – a few miles away from where Matt was born. Like us, Tid was originally from Kent, England.

We had found some interesting relics from Cyprus’s mining history, but still no trains. We turned our attention to CMC’s abandoned industrial site, purported to contain a number of old mine trains. It was somewhere in Xeros on the south side of the coastal road, overlooked by an Argentinian UN camp. After driving up and down the road we finally found the UN camp, but no industrial site. And definitely no engines. We found out later that the site had been cleared in 2011 and no one knows what happened to the trains. We took Goobie to a playground while we decided what to do.

‘I know you don’t like giving up, Juju, but we need to start heading back soon,’ said Matt.

He was right. It was getting late and Goobie was getting fed up. But the book publisher in me couldn’t let today’s story end like this. It was so anticlimactic.

And then we remembered Lefka. Hadn’t we read somewhere that a train used to sit by the road going into the village? We had to have one last stab.
We got in the car and headed south, off the coastal road towards Lefka (Lefke). We climbed the hill, looking on both sides for a train. As we got to the top, we rounded a corner.

And there it was.

Gleaming bright yellow in the late afternoon sun was CMC 5 sitting by the entrance to a children’s playground.

‘Yayyyyyy!!!! A train!’ We’d finally found one.

Goobie leapt out of the car and went to meet his third Cyprus train.

He looked all round it, at the plate on the side and the pistons. Then he climbed into the cab. This train still had levers that worked. Goobie was delighted.

‘Mummy, this train is called Port-Yet,’ he said, seriously.

Soon, other children joined him, pretending to drive the train to imaginary places.

This train had worked in the Lefka area for decades transporting copper from the mines. And little Port-Yet was still working hard – his job now to entertain the youngest generation. As I watched Goobie play, I thought about everything we’d seen today, the huge piles of waste and our asbestos scare at the jetty. And I realised that Port-Yet was probably one of the few CMC relics to actually bring some joy to an area blighted by pollution.