2 trains roll across Koreas' border

SEOUL, South Korea — Near the Demilitarized Zone, where grim-faced North Korean and South Korean soldiers eyeball each other's every move, children giggle on a roller-coaster ride.

A small amusement park called Peace Land is one of the first things visitors see upon passing a military checkpoint at the DMZ, one of Seoul's most popular tourist attractions. Cartoonish plastic South Korean MPs stand sentry outside a theater and museum.

A South Korean tour guide told us — six American reporters participating in the 2007 Korea-U.S. Journalism Exchange last month — the 2.4-mile wide, 155-mile-long swath of ground dividing the two countries since July 1953 is now a symbol of peace and unification rather than a partition. The heavily fortified border, in fact the world's heaviest, suggests otherwise.

The DMZ lies about 30 miles from Seoul along the 38th parallel. The highway to the tourist area follows the Han River and is lined with miles of chain-link fence topped with endless rolls of razor wire. A wide billboard spanning the road just a few miles from the border is loaded with explosives as a last line of defense. The Freedom Bridge across which the sides once exchanged prisoners ends at a flag-shrouded fence.

All serve as ominous reminders that North and South Korea never formally ended their war.

But for a few minutes Thursday it was all aboard the peace train.

The divided Koreas sent trains lumbering across the border for the first time in more than a half century, reaching another symbolic milestone in a reconciliation process hindered by the North's nuclear ambitions.

Firecrackers and white balloons filled the skies as a five-car train started rolling north on a restored track on the west side of the peninsula. On the eastern side, a North Korean train crossed into the South on another reconnected railway where children bearing flowers greeted it.

It was the first train crossing of the no man's land dividing the two sides since inter-Korean rail lines were severed early in the 1950-53 Korean War.

Just a month ago, South Korean train stations near the border sat empty and eerily quiet.

The recently built Dorasan Station on the west side of the peninsula bills itself as "Not the last station from the South, but the first station to the North." But there were no passengers going either direction. South Korean guards posted in the depot had little to do but good-naturedly pose for pictures with tourists.