First Beijing-Tibet train reaches Lhasa, with altitude sickness and stunning beauty

Passengers look out the window aboard the Beijing-Lhasa Express Monday on the final leg of its inaugural journey to Tibet. China spent $4.2 billion building the world's highest railway on delicate permafrost. (ELIZABETH DALZIEL / AP)

LHASA, China — The first train from Beijing to Tibet finished an arduous journey along the world's highest railway Monday, opening direct service to the Himalayan region that China has been trying for decades to tame.

Pens spit ink and packaged foods burst in the low pressure as the "Sky Train" climbed the 16,640-foot Tanggula Pass. Laptop computers and digital-music players failed, the tiny air bags that cushion their moving parts broken at high altitude.

Some passengers threw up. Others took Tibetan herbs or breathed oxygen from tubes. Outside, Tibetan antelope and wild donkeys grazed beneath snowcapped mountains and deep-blue skies.

Despite Beijing's public commitments to preserving the fragile Tibetan plateau crossed by the train, plastic bags, bottles and cardboard boxes were scattered along the tracks. Large sections of the permanently frozen earth were scarred by vehicle tracks.

Many Tibetans loyal to their exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, say the railway is part of a campaign to crush Tibetan culture, and a still-simmering separatist movement, by encouraging a huge influx of majority Han Chinese migrants.

One Tibetan passenger asked a Western reporter what the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, thought of the train. The man, who asked not to be identified by name, said that with China's Internet monitoring, it was too dangerous for him to search news Web sites for the information himself.

The Dalai Lama has said that the railway is neither good nor bad, but that it remains to be seen how it will be used, and whether it will bring real benefit to Tibetans.

China says the newly opened 710-mile stretch of rail, linking the ancient Tibetan capital of Lhasa to a station that had been a final stop on China's vast rail network, is an unparalleled engineering marvel.

The $4.2 billion project was built in four years on delicate permafrost, marshy ground easily damaged by human encroachment. Engineers used sunshades and high-tech cooling columns plunged into embankments to help ensure that the ground stays frozen.

China has earmarked $190 million for environmental protection along the railway.