Deep in the Cambodian jungle I was rewarded with the kind of experience only those who wander far afield can find. Locals call it the Norry Train, but to everyone else it is the Bamboo Train, and it is great and simple fun.

During the second half of the 19th century, Cambodia was a part of French Indochina and the French colonists dotted its rainforests with plantations. They grew coffee and banana, among other things, and needed a way to transport this produce from jungle to market. So they built a small-gauge railroad complete with miniature steam engine specifically for this task.

Judging by the size of the tracks, I figure the train must have been akin to today’s amusement-park rides, but in its day it got the job done.

Passengers boarding the train pay for their passage by bartering.

The little train chugged along for half a century until the self-proclaimed communist organization Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975. In their attempt to create an agrarian society, anyone with an education or anything that provided information or even transportation was the enemy.

This included the little jungle train. They destroyed the engine, but left the rails intact, thinking them worthless without the train itself. Years went by and the jungle claimed the tracks for its own.

Today, nearly three decades after the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, Cambodia is desperately poor and in need of any and all modes of transport. Most of its roads are dirt. The local jungle people always knew of the train tracks, and gradually began to clear the undergrowth and land mines that had saturated the area.

The tracks run for about 200 miles (320 km) through the heart of the country, and make a perfect little highway for those smart enough to make it operational. I learned about the train from a guide I hired in Phnom Penh. He had only ridden it once before, since doing so is considered a luxury among many of the local poor.

There are no actual stations or stopping points, but rather, a series of gathering points that the jungle people use; places where they come together to socialize and barter goods. This is also where they board the train.

With no steam engine available, locals collected old axles left from military vehicles, of which there was an abundance strewn through out the countryside. They cut and sized them to fit the tracks, added a wooden platform with a woven bamboo matting for comfort — thus the name — and attached a portable, one-horse-power gasoline engine, linking it to the axles by a rubber strip from an old tire.

The axles sit bare on the track, steel on steel. This creates quite a light show of sparks while the train is careening around a bend. If necessity is the mother of invention, this train should be called “Necessity.”

There are dozens of these little vehicles scattered along the tracks. While it is unlikely they were massed produced, they all look similar, so it is believed that they were for the most part constructed in the same area.