The News - July 19

Rail woes

There are 5,072 miles (8,163kms) of railways in Pakistan and they are gradually falling apart. The death of our railway system is one of the great post-colonial tragedies, and is in stark contrast to the story in India where the state rail company turns a healthy profit and the network is expanding all the time. Ours is contracting and the latest contraction involves the suspension of six more passenger services due to what are said to be financial hardships faced by the railway service. In recent years there has been a succession of inept managers at the top – remember Sheikh Rashid and his proposed bullet train? – and the current lot are no exception. The General Manager of Pakistan Rail speaking to a private TV channel on Saturday said that these six trains were incurring a loss of Rs1.5 billion annually, and that the engines used to haul them would be better employed pulling the 60 freight trains stuck at various locations for lack of motive power.

Just as the news of cutbacks was breaking so was news of new acquisitions. China is to supply 75 locomotives to Pakistan over the next 45 months and an agreement has been signed with a Chinese bank to finance the deal. This contradicts reports in some parts of the media to the effect that the agreement to purchase had been retracted – and once again confusion reigns. There is still a PC1 floating somewhere in the ether relating to the purchase of 150 locomotives from the USA in order to meet our operational requirements; and meanwhile the platforms are crowded with passengers awaiting trains that might take years, never mind hours or days, to show up. We used to be proud of our railways, as proud as we were of our national airline. Sadly, both have fallen into wrack and ruin. If we could now manage to disable the entire road network we would have completed a job of destruction that would bring joy to the hearts of our enemies.

Source : http://thenews.jang.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=251631