'Secret train' the Americans don't seem to be asking questions about

Every day for the last fortnight Salam Salom, a top Iraqi railwayman, has sat down with the Americans. They discussed the bomb-damaged track, the wrecked communications network, and the looters who descended on the rolling stock like a plague of locusts.

But one subject has not come up. There has never been any mention, he says, of chemical or biological weapons.

"They have not discussed this with me," he said, after yet another round of talks with a US army officer in the imperious monolith erected by the British in 1953 to serve as Baghdad's main railway terminal. "Perhaps they talked to the director-general about it, but it has not been raised with me."

If true, this is remarkable. The Americans are supposedly conducting an intensive search to find the illicit weapons programme whose alleged existence served as a pretext for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Three months ago, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, declared that the US had a first-hand description of mobile biological weapons factories that ran on wheels and rails so that they could be moved around to evade detection by UN inspectors.

Mr Salom is the traffic manager for the entire 2,000km rail network – high up the pecking order in the Baathist-dominated management structure of Iraqi national railways. He may very well be a stranger to Saddam Hussein's closest military secrets, but one might expect him at least to be asked about the issue by US officials. Yet, he insists, there has been nothing.

He can remember first learning that Mr Powell had, on 5 February, told the UN Security Council that the Americans had evidence of biological weapons factories inside lorries and train cars. Mr Powell went into considerable detail, saying the US had an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of the mobile biological laboratories and was present during a 1998 production run that went wrong, killing 12 technicians. He told the Security Council how the Iraqis would begin a production run on Thursday at midnight, because they believed that the UN weapons inspection team (Unscom) would not carry out any operations on Friday, the Muslim holy day.

"I heard it on the news," said Mr Salom, "I thought at the time, that's just not true. We have nothing like that, nothing".

However, he did claim to have some knowledge of another secret Iraqi military project. Seven years ago, he said, plans were drawn up to create missile launchers on rails. The idea was rejected by Saddam, who concluded that the launchers would be easy to detect by military satellite and would provide a simple target for US and British warplanes. At this point, Mr Salom changed the subject. He refused to answer further questions on the alleged mobile biological weapons labs, declaring the subject to be "inappropriate".

Suggestions that the Americans appear surprisingly unengaged in their mission to unearth weapons of mass destruction come as no surprise to many Iraqis, who have long maintained that the US occupation is about seizing their oil. This is certainly the view of ticket inspector Ali Muhsan al-Kinani, 42, a railwayman for 25 years.

He backed up this argument by pointing out that the Americans have done nothing to weed out the upper echelons of the Iraqi railway company. He said that US officials are working in close co-operation with the same men who made the workforce's lives a misery by jailing them for minor administrative offences, or levying large fines if they were involved in an accident.

The Americans have also yet to speak to him about mobile biological weapons labs. Had they done so they would have drawn a blank. But they would have heard from him about the existence of a top secret and mysterious "special train".

Yesterday he and two of his colleagues described a train – about which they dared not speak during the Saddam years – that moved constantly around the railway system, and which they believe might have contained chemical weapons, although they admit to being unsure.

According to Mr al-Kinani, the train first appeared around 1996. Its wagons were brown, unmarked and cylindrical. He said it usually had four or five wagons, although these were sometimes mixed with ordinary rolling stock to disguise it. Discussion of its movements, or even its existence, by rail staff was forbidden. It was usually attended by troops from the Special Republican Guard, he said.

"It didn't run on the same tracks that ordinary trains run on," said Mr al-Kinani. "UN inspectors did come here, but they didn't see the train. It was moved to Hilla and then to Ad Diwaniya. They were always moving this train." He said he would see it about once a month. "We would see it in the mornings, often near Fallujah [30 miles west of Baghdad]."

So did Ya'arab Raauf al-Hadad, 52, another ticket inspector: "The engines would be changed around, but the train was brown."

Shehad Ahmed al-Alami, 30, a train driver, said he, too, had seen the train. "Drivers would just be told to come with their engines and hook up the carriages. On the special train we were not allowed to leave our cabins. We would just hook up and say nothing."

This train may, of course, have been doing nothing more sinister than carrying loads of sanctions-busting oil. But it is strange – almost as strange as the Americans' apparent lack of interest in finding out more.