Shanghai Railway Locomotive Depot: The Engine Servicing Yard West of the Old North Station

Basic facts

This section is about an institution, not a sight. It is no longer on this ground — today one half of the old site is the passenger-car servicing depot (not open), and the other half is the Shanghai Railway Museum (open).

First, the location: the Qiujiang Road area

The old North Station was not a station standing by itself; it was a yard.

The old North Station lay west of Baoshan Road in the south-east of today's Zhabei District, wedged tightly among the fork of Tianmu East Road, Qiujiang Road and Jiaotong Road. It covered more than 10 hectares.

Within this yard the locomotive depot occupied the western part:

In the early years after Liberation, the Shanghai area had only one very small Shanghai Locomotive Depot, west of the Shanghai North Station.

The road "Qiujiang Road" itself has a history too. It was not a street newly opened later, but one made by filling in the former Qiujiang channel: on the north side of the lower reaches of the Wusong River (Suzhou Creek) there was once an old waterway; in the middle and late Ming dynasty the Wusong River shifted to a newly opened channel to the south, the old waterway silted up and narrowed, and around the 1930s it was filled in section by section and turned into roads — the western section became Taiyangshan Road, and the eastern section is Qiujiang Road and Qiujiang Branch Road.

So the order of the place names here is: first a river, then a railway, and only then a road.

In this section the word "I" is needed in just one place: I was born in this yard. That sentence ends here — everything written below is verifiable.

1905: an "engine shed"

The depot is older than the old North Station's British-style station building.

In 1905 an engine shed appeared in Shanghai — "the Shanghai engine shed of the Shanghai–Nanjing Railway" — and this was the predecessor of the Shanghai Locomotive Depot. The Hangzhou Locomotive Depot was founded in the same year, and both count their age from it.

That year the Shanghai–Nanjing Railway was still under construction (the whole line did not open until 1908), and the old North Station's four-storey office building was not completed until 1909. Only with a place for repairing locomotives did the station square come later.

This line runs all the way to 1949: locomotives and rolling stock parted ways, locomotives to the locomotive depot, passenger and freight cars to the rolling-stock depot.

What is interesting is that the two were at the same address, of the same root and the same origin to begin with — their predecessor was the same engine shed; they went their separate ways in 1949, and decades later merged back into one. Who lived in a compound is often more worth recording than the compound itself.

What "servicing" means

To write this section I must first make one piece of jargon clear: servicing.

It does not mean "putting equipment in order"; it means a locomotive's full going-over between two runs. When a steam locomotive comes back from a run, it must do these things in this order:

So "locomotive depot" is very plain: a depot that manages locomotives. The railway's division of labour is a clear chain —

The station manages passengers and freight, the locomotive depot manages locomotives, the rolling-stock depot manages cars.

That a locomotive can run depends on the locomotive depot; that a carriage is well repaired depends on the rolling-stock depot. The two things each had their own territory in the old North Station yard.

The age of the steam locomotive

From the completion of the old North Station's new building in 1909 to the 1970s, the North Station's locomotives were always coal-burning.

A steam locomotive depot was famous on the railway as a heavy-labour unit: clearing ash and coaling were jobs of shoulder and hand, and after a shift a man was as black as his engine. In the yard stood tall water columns; entering the station, leaving it or crossing a level crossing all called for a blast of the whistle, and in winter the platform was one sheet of white steam — such was that generation's whole impression of "a railway station".

From 1969 to 1972 came the peak of the "sent-down" movement, and train after train left the North Station. Later someone wrote of this locomotive depot in a memoir:

"It was the locomotives of our locomotive depot that carried this great army of a million sent-down youth away to Xinjiang, to the Great Northern Wilderness and to Xishuangbanna."

("A million" is a memoirist's approximation. This book copies the sentence only to keep a first-hand sentence that still carries warmth.)

The motive power was changed over slowly. From the early 1970s Dongfeng class diesel locomotives began to be introduced; in 1979 steam haulage on the main-line passenger service came to a complete end; and by 1995 every steam locomotive in the Shanghai area had been retired.

From burning coal to burning oil, this yard took eighty years.

1975: becoming a passenger locomotive depot

Locomotive operations in the Shanghai area divided the work in 1975.

In 1975 the Nanxiang marshalling yard was rebuilt and expanded and the Nanxiang Locomotive Depot was built, and at the same time the former Shanghai Locomotive Depot was made a passenger locomotive depot, also with a capacity for diesel locomotive working.

From then on the two depots each had their own patch:

This step split locomotive operations in the Shanghai area into two: the haulage of a freight train belonged to Nanxiang, and the section left west of the old North Station handled passenger trains alone from then on.

And this step left a larger role in place — the haulage of passenger trains.

1978: the "Zhou Enlai" locomotive

On 5 January 1978, with the approval of the CCP Central Committee and the State Council, the DF3-0058 (Dongfeng 3 class) diesel locomotive of the Shanghai Locomotive Depot was named the "Zhou Enlai".

This was no small matter: in October 1976 the chief drivers of the model "Mao Zedong" locomotive crews of more than 100 locomotive depots across the country, representing railway workers, asked that a "Zhou Enlai" locomotive be named, to remember Premier Zhou. In the end the task fell to the Shanghai Locomotive Depot — and it was the only one of the three "great-man" locomotives of the day to haul passenger trains.

In more than forty years this locomotive has gone through four generations:

1898 is the year Premier Zhou was born, and this number was specially made and permanently fixed.

By March 2025 the "Zhou Enlai" locomotive had run 13 million kilometres in safety, the equivalent of 325 times round the Earth; its crew numbers 18, with an average age of 29. The depot's "Zhou Enlai" locomotive exhibition room is a national railway demonstration base for Party-member education and a national railway patriotic-education base.

1987: half the yard handed over

In 1981 the Ministry of Railways and the Shanghai Municipal People's Government reported to the State Council on preparing to build a new station; on 20 September 1984 work began on the new station building; and on 28 December 1987 the new passenger station opened.

From that day the old North Station stopped handling passenger traffic and was renamed Shanghai North Station. It was not demolished but changed its trade:

The original yard was rebuilt into the Shanghai Railway technical servicing depot for passenger cars, used mainly for passenger-car servicing.

"Passenger-car servicing" is not the same thing as the "locomotive servicing" spoken of earlier: one waits on the locomotive, the other waits on the carriage — washing, watering, inspection and marshalling. On the same ground, the institution changed from "the one that manages locomotives" to "the one that manages carriages".

2004: the old station building becomes a museum

The old North Station's original station building was listed in August 2000 as a protected cultural relic of Jing'an District, and on 28 August 2004 it reopened as the Shanghai Railway Museum.

In the museum's outdoor display area stand the whole set of gear that once belonged to the locomotive depot: a steam locomotive, a platform awning, a water column and a semaphore signal.

This is exactly why this section is written about it:

The institution itself is no longer there, but the equipment it used is still standing — only its identity has changed, from tool to exhibit.

In March 2021 the site of the Shanghai North Railway Station was included in the first batch of Shanghai's roll of revolutionary cultural relics.

A closing word

This piece is a little different from the previous two.

The schools are still running on their original sites: Zhabei No. 1 Central Primary School changed its name and is still on Kangle Road; Xinzhong moved to Yuanping Road — they are both still there. The locomotive depot is not: it moved, merged, changed its name, and its old ground was cut in two — half became the passenger-car servicing depot, half became the museum.

So why write about it at all?

Because the "north" in Zhabei has always been reckoned as "north of the railway station". There is in fact another layer: in the age of the steam locomotive, this was where many of Shanghai's locomotives queued to "wash up". A district's mornings were once woken by a whistle — and this is worth leaving on paper.

Sources: the origin of the locomotive depot, its state in the early years after Liberation, the 1975 division of work and the servicing-facility data are based on the section "Locomotive depots and rolling-stock depots" of Shanghai Railway Station and Yard Works, a Shanghai local gazetteer; the founding of the Shanghai Locomotive Depot in 1905 and its common origin with the rolling-stock depot are based on the People's Railway website and reports of the China Railway Shanghai Group; the naming date, the four changes of class and the mileage of the "Zhou Enlai" locomotive are based on China News Service (4 March 2025) and The Paper's "These Locomotives with Great Names — What Are Their Stories?"; the location of the old North Station yard and "Qiujiang Road at the fork", the rebuilding of the original yard into the passenger-car servicing depot in 1987 and the building of the museum in 2004 are based on Tales of the "Old North Station" on Tianmu East Road, the Jing'an District gazetteer and the relevant Baidu Baike entries; the origin of Qiujiang Road is based on Suzhou Creek · Neighbourhood Observations: Seeing the Railways and Waterways Interwoven in Shanghai's Urban Development from Shanghai Station; and the sentence "the locomotives of our locomotive depot" is quoted from Tales of the "Old North Station" on Tianmu East Road (personal reminiscence, Grade C). The full bibliography is in Appendix 4.