Indonesia, with her 18,000+ islands is a land of many tales and leg­ends. Obscured in plain sight, the often-disregarded, dutch-built rail­way sys­tem was where most of such tales began. Spanning thou­sands of kilo­me­ters from the island of Java, to the island of Sumatera, was the seed and the back­bone of the nation’s agri-industry, and the place where many bed­time sto­ries originated.

The Indonesian Railway Company, PT. Kereta Api Indonesia is under­tak­ing one of its most ambi­tious project, they aim to rebuild the pub­lic image of the Railway lifestyle, and to spear­head the move­ment is con­serv­ing the national rail­way heritage.

To kick­start the ini­tia­tive, PT KAI is launch­ing a cam­paign to raise aware­ness & funds for the project, a team of archi­tects, his­to­ri­ans, arche­ol­o­gist, urban plan­ners & doc­u­men­tar­ian were embarked upon a series of trip trail­ing the rail­way routes dubbed as the Trans-Java, Trans-Sumatera rail­way lines.

Beginning in early March this year, I, along with a half-dozen pas­sion­ate trav­eler started the tour from the route’s orig­i­nat­ing point: Central Java island’s cap­i­tal city, Semarang, where the The Thousand Gate Mansion — The East India Company — Railway Corporation’s first & orig­i­nal head­quar­ter designed by the leg­endary Thomas Karsten, father of the Indonesian art-deco build­ing design.

I have a story to tell.

Outcome of this project is yet to be announced, but a selec­tion of the pho­tographs from this expe­di­tion is pub­lished under the Pictorial sec­tion: The Indonesian Railway and The Java Heritage. Update: The Java Heritage Movie is now up on Vimeo.

If you’d like to pledge your sup­port, or learn more about the project, PT. KAI has a new web­site ded­i­cated to this project.