COMMENTARY
Saritdet Marukatat
If you build it, they will come.'' A voice inspires farmer Ray Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner in the movie Field of Dreams, to turn his cornfield into a baseball ground. After the construction, dead baseball players come out to play the game.
The bigwigs at the State Railway of Thailand and Transport Ministry are now thinking something similar. If new lines and the additional double-track networks are built, they will come. What they mean is that more passengers and freight will go by rail, thus ending SRT's misery.
After enjoying profits in the early years, the agency has been in the red since 1974. Its accumulated losses stand at 51 billion baht. Another 34 billion baht liability will be added for the Airport Rail Link project to be launched next year.
The main reason for losing money looks simple. More roads have been built in the country than railway lines. And they are constantly improved from two to four and even six lanes for key highways across the country.
The rail network in this country covers some 4,043km, less than in neighbouring Burma, which has around 5,500km. Worse, only 280km of the Thai rail is the double-track system, compared with 200km in Malaysia and 600km in Burma.
Thus it is not difficult to imagine why delays are very common for passengers due to that traffic bottleneck. To arrive at a railway station only to find that the train taking them to their destination will come two hours late, is still possible.
The single track limits the driver to run the train at a maximum speed of 120km per hour. Thus it is understandable for railway officials to envy those working at the Highways Department because roads always come first when policy-makers talk about transport infrastructure.
Suddenly, last Thursday, something favourable to the railway agency happened at a transport meeting. All the big shots agreed that it was time to make a serious effort to develop the railways.
So now the government will spend 39 billion baht to improve the tracks, including laying more double tracks.
That won't be enough. In the long term, around 367 billion baht will be spent for new and wider tracks covering 2,644km. The railway jargon for this is ''standard gauge,'' which is 1.435 metres wide, compared to the one-metre gauge system being used now. Thailand will eventually have high speed trains running at 160km per hour from Bangkok to Nakhon Sawan, Pattaya, Chanthaburi and Nakhon Ratchasima. The bottom line for this is that focus should be shifted to trains because they can carry people and goods in large amounts at the same time. Logistics costs will be cut and there will be even less pollution especially in the long term when electricity, not diesel, will be the main power to haul trains.
Should train enthusiasts give the government a big round of applause? The answer could be ''No.'' One conclusion of this ambitious plan is that it is going too far, too quickly.
There is no argument the SRT needs the double-track system. The on-time schedule and faster trains which would result will lure people to take the train and factory owners to transport their freight. But will it need to add the standard gauge into the existing system? Whether the tracks should be widened from one metre to 1.435m has been the subject of debate among train officials for several years. Wider tracks mean trains can run faster, that's true. But new technologies can also help trains on the one-metre track to run faster, too. The money to build the new system should be used to expand the train network to more areas in the country. Only 600km have been added to the railway map since the establishment of the SRT to replace the Royal State Railways of Siam in 1951. That was 57 years ago.
It would be easy to equip the SRT with high speed trains, but whether it would be worth it remains a question. Other countries such as Japan, France, Germany, South Korea and Taiwan have those kind of trains. But that happened after all basic train infrastructure was put in place, including the double-track system, and enough coaches to serve passengers, enough locomotives to pull the trains and qualified staff to run the organisation.
''Don't think too far ahead about high speed trains. Let's find a way to have our present trains run quicker first and think about other things later.'' That's what one senior SRT official said about what should be the priority for his agency.
Saritdet Marukatat is News Editor, Bangkok Post.
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