Tourists dice with danger on Hanoi's train street

Hanoi: Tourists snatch arms and legs away from a passing train in Hanoi, shrinking back into railside cafes that have brought lucrative business to a...

Hanoi: Tourists snatch arms and legs away from a passing train in Hanoi, shrinking back into railside cafes that have brought lucrative business to a former slum disdained by the government.

Authorities have repeatedly tried to shut down the tumbledown quarter of the Vietnamese capital for safety reasons, but any closure seems unlikely as social media brings more visitors to the area.

"I feel adrenaline because (the train) was so close," Helena Bizonova from Slovakia told AFP, standing inches from the colonial-era locomotive chugging past at 10 kilometres (six miles) an hour.

The lantern-adorned tracks -- and the elegant cafes that line them -- are well known online and "something that I will never experience in my life again", she told AFP. Vietnam's French former rulers built the railway in the early 1900s to transport goods and people across the country, then part of French Indochina along with Laos and Cambodia.

Parts of the line were badly damaged when US bombs rained down on the communist-ruled north during the Vietnam War that ended half a century ago.