While the recent death involving a calf in Perak broke many hearts, this was unfortunately not the first accident involving wild elephants.
In September 1894, a steam train ran over a calf and killed it
About 131 years ago, a male elephant attacked a steam train carrying three passenger carriages. The impact of the attack caused the train to derail.
An elephant remembers, and according to Utusan TV, the male elephant was said to have attacked the train out of grief and anger for his calf, which died after getting hit by a train in the same area earlier.
No passengers were injured, but two workers reportedly died due to injuries. The passengers had to travel on foot to Teluk Anson Railway Station (now Teluk Intan), which was 3 miles (4.8km) away. The elephant, however, died due to the strong impact from hitting the train, as per the official website of the Teluk Intan City Council.
The train was travelling from Tapah Road to Teluk Anson and was manned by an Englishman at a speed of 30 to 40 km/h. At that time, it was considered high speed for that technology. Some of the passengers had just returned from inspecting mining locations in Perak when the attack took place.
The elephant’s skull is on display at the Perak Museum
A photo of an English merchant standing on the elephant’s carcass
According to Ivor Hugh Norman (IHN) Evans, a British anthropologist who spent a big part of his life working in British Malaya, the skull of the male elephant was the heaviest recorded in history on the Malay Peninsula at the time.
The skull and two tusks of the elephant are now kept and displayed at the Perak Museum, Taiping. The male elephant’s thigh bone, which is about a meter long, is still well-kept and displayed at the mini-concourse of the Johor Bahru KTMB museum. The elephant was said to be bigger than the train.
A memorial was built near the incident site
To commemorate this extraordinary event, the British railway administration built a memorial near the site of the incident, reported Utusan TV.
Decades have passed, and the memorial has nearly deteriorated. The railway line from Tapah Road to Teluk Intan was discontinued in the late 1980s due to operational losses, causing the area to become overgrown with shrubs.
March 2023
Efforts were made in 2019 to clean the shrubs to make the memorial visible and allow access to visitors, but unfortunately, nature has once again reclaimed the area, which is now abandoned, as reported by Astro Awani.
The memorial sign reads, “There is buried here a wild elephant who in defence of his herd charged and derailed a train on the 17th day of Sept 1894.”
The memorial grew increasingly dilapidated, with its paint already fading.
