‘Trained’

I read Paolo Montecillo’s article the other Sunday and was glad to know the Philippine National Railways has begun its regular run. After shaky test runs, interrupted by storms, the trains to Bicol are back to form. Courtesy of a donation by Japan of 20 new coaches last month, with 30 more to follow before the end of the year.

At least this time around, the problem has to do only with natural calamities and not human ones. With typhoons and not with PNR officials, the latter having struck in the past with far more viciousness. Junio Ragragio, PNR’s general manager, has done quite an astonishing job putting at least the Bicol Express on its feet from its wobbly state. No, from its prostrate state, it having ground to a halt completely five years ago. It is no small lesson on what public officials can do if they just put their minds to it. Indeed, it is no small lesson on what public officials can do if they are not corrupt.

The problem though is not the trains, it is the tracks. That is what requires huge outlays if the Bicol Express is to become truly serviceable, never mind go back to its glory days. That was what brought the trains to suspend operations last July-August after they had been running for a few months: Heavy rains had eroded the ground underneath stretches of tracks in Camarines Sur, making passage dangerous. Fortunately, Typhoons “Pedring” and “Quiel” decided to unleash their fury elsewhere, and by then the tracks in those parts of Camarines Sur had been shored up.

Rehabilitating the tracks to a point where you don’t have to worry—and stop running—every time it rains hard is what’s going to take a lot of time, effort and money. And a lot more political will. It will depend on government’s sense of priorities, specifically how much of humongous long-term benefits it is willing to forego for marginal short-term ones. The benefits of trains will not be patent at once, they will be so only quite literally in the long run.

I myself love trains. In part concededly out of nostalgia, I grew up on them. It was pretty much the only way to travel from Naga to Manila. The plane was only for the exceedingly rich, the merely rich settled for the air-conditioned cabins of the PNR. And the bus was only for the really down-and-out or desperate. The South Road was synonymous with bad roads, a reputation it has been hard put to put down, the bukols in the contracts to build it being well in evidence in the quite literal bukols that sprouted in various parts of it. Or the gaping pits that welled up in the middle of it. Indeed, it wasn’t just synonymous with bad roads, it was synonymous with badlands. It was not uncommon to read about a bus being held up by bandits that leaped out of the bushes, a scene straight out of the Wild West.

Frankly, I can’t understand how the government could have driven the PNR to the ground, or reversed the roles of the trains and buses in the north and south. Only ineptitude and greed could have done that. It’s a miracle the PNR has been revived at all. As it is, it’s just showing the barest signs of life, however that seems robust enough where it’s coming from. More than the trains themselves, the problem is the tracks. They have not just been left to rot and rust beyond the public gaze, they have been left to be stolen, like a decrepit car left in the parking lot for that same purpose.

The ballast in particular has been ripped off in some parts, with the most unsavory effects. The ballast is what keeps ships and trains on even keel. Without it, the ship or train would rock side to side. Which is what the train to Naga does intermittently today, the swaying not being of the kind that reminds you of Michael Buble. I brought a Kindle last month, looking forward to finishing the fourth book of “The Song of Ice and Fire.” I gave it up almost immediately.

But the bus is pretty much the same thing. You can’t read in it, not on the South Road. And it’s not smooth either. In fact, you feel banged up after the long hours to and from Naga. Right now, the train is the cheaper alternative, by a hundred or couple of hundred bucks depending on what coach you take, and if the pace at which it is being revived is anything to go by, an increasingly viable one.

But that, as I said, depends on government’s sense of priorities. The PNR can always be opened up in part to private investors but it will still have to be owned for the most part by government. Its very charter proclaims so: It is a public interest. However well it does, however efficiently it is run, it will require subsidy. That may make it a less than an attractive proposition right now, privately owned bus lines may look like they make better economic sense, but that’s not so in the long run. Trains are by far the more efficient mass transport system, even if government has to bear the bulk of the expense. The PNR’s capacity to save the nation a fortune in oil bill, its capacity to bring to life the communities the tracks run through (a thing people killed for in the old American West), and its capacity to make commerce flow through its tracks the way blood flows through the arteries of the human body is awesome.

That requires a national leader with foresight. A leader who is willing to plant the seeds today for a harvest that might be reaped only long after his time. A leader, that is, who is not looking to be elected or reelected. Or would want to be so even if he could. P-Noy can always be that leader.

A nation crisscrossed by railroad tracks? Wouldn’t that be a grand sight to see.