The Railway Authority of Thailand is donating old railway carriages to help preserve the coral reefs.
One hundred ageing and disused railway carriages may not seem like much of a birthday present, but this gift was presented today to Her Majesty Queen Sirikit of Thailand by the State Railway of Thailand (SRT). Those old railway cars will serve the Queen's Royal conservation projects to revive corals and build new artificial coral reefs in the Thai seas, helping to preserve some of Thailand's rare and beautiful coral reefs.
Khun Sukaman Sritula, head of the Railway Authority of Thailand public relations division, announced today that they had selected 100 ageing freight carriages that were kept at the Makkasan, Nakhon Ratchasima and Uttradit railway engine workshops and presented them to HM the Queen in honor of her 71st birthday.
The railway carriages will be used in Royal conservation projects to revive corals and coastal life in the southern provinces of Pattani and Narathiwat in Thailand, where they will be dumped in the sea and made into artificial coral reefs.
The State Railway of Thailand has agreed to first clean the carriages and remove unnecessary equipment, before sending the railway carriages to Chonburi near Pattaya, from where the Fisheries Department will load them onto boats to dump them on their final destination.
This strange conservation project was first initiated by Her Majesty the Queen in 2001, when 210 railway carriages were dumped in the sea to rehabilitate marine life off the Southern Provinces of Thailand, where small-scale fishermen had found their catches becoming smaller.
Fish had increased with about 50% in those areas, due to the artificial coral reefs that populated the dumped railway carriages. The new marine life found around those artificial coral reefs in Thailand included snapper, cardinal, groper, rabbit fish and plankton.
While the old railway cars could easily fetch up to 20,000 baht each (US$ 500), the Railway Authority of Thailand decided to donate them for Her Majesty the Queen's project. Other Thai state agencies, including the Highway Department, also get involved by donating cement pipes and poles as part of the artificial coral reefs program in Thailand.
