Revamping the Sri Lanka Railways towards National Transport Policy

The railway is in a complete mess - Everything Wrong with the Railway, It appeared to me as that the authorities wanted to do away the railways, whenever I took a train to out skirts of Colombo, a complete mess.

Please do not do away the railway transport, because simply you cannot afford to give more burden to the road transport which is already bungled up with resolvable congestion of traffic and jamming at every junction as it tries to passage ever booming vehicle. The best solution is to work in coordination with railways, or vice-versa to solve the burning problems of entire transport system, which itself badly require a complete revamp, starting with remodeling the existing system. Different sections of CGR should work in integration in targeting to achieve three objectives.

 

1. Providing decent, civilized and safety ensured transport service to working sector, suburbs to urban 

2. Attracting more passengers towards railways as means of attracting commuters towards Public Transport as a National Policy.

3.  Resource management to increase the efficiency of available locomotives and engines through innovative operations.

It is a must before considering the massive projects of 5 and 10 year plans as solution for present problems, to look into what we are doing now and how we are managing the available resources towards solving the problems we are facing now. Unless we do that, how we are going to simply cope up with such sophisticated systems and claim it would be a successful plan to the present crisis born out of mess, crisis is born out from messing up.

A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation. It was said by a Colombian Mayor – but well fits into the Colombo’s Necessity, it is mandated to resolve the problem within the available resources first, before venturing into mega projects we all know why they are in lookout for mega projects. Bungling up for Newer and bungle the new as well, it is a cyclic manipulation for corruption knowingly or unknowingly through mismanagement – absence of self-analytical improvement leads to failure of the system both by commuter satisfaction as well as for economic benefits and income.

I suggested of mono rail system over Colombo Metropolitan in 2004, I am not backing up, but let us know where and how we faltering  so that to cope up with a new one.

Install real attractiveness and safety into the CGR service to the commuters to meet the above, this would be far better than introducing the luxury bus service in order to ease the traffic  congestion of the already cramped up road travel. How many a luxury bus can accommodate for a destination.  Therefore it is clearer that attracting the commuters towards public transport is far more economical than through road transport. But the railway is already packed up with cramping of passengers particularly of suburbs of Colombo the work force – these important people of each and every sector are jam packed to squeeze out the healthy strength to and fro everyday 5 to 6 days a week, a work force cannot be treated like this.

The Railway system is one of those that we inherited from our colonial masters, and if we imagine that they would have planned it in a manner suiting to our people’s respect and decency of travel never, Sri Lanka Railways (CGR) [I find no reason to call it SLR] should consider their commuters as respectable human being, not as begging animals languishing for cheapest transport mode. First CGR shall make some attempt to install some respect to the commuters and the wagons designed for “can-packing of humans” should be removed from the full passenger system and be used for transport of vendors with commodities, vegetables catch of fish and animals and should be the cheapest mode of class; these “Bench Seated” compartments suits to the vendors and the railway authorities should make arrangements to promote these “special compartments” and making additional income through every train plying on coastal  lines, most importantly in “Raja Rata Rajani” plying from Vavuniya to Matara which is a farmers travel mode apart from pilgrims and Tourists. Therefore each train carrying the office crowd to Colombo should have class variations of 1st, 2nd, 3rd and the fourth Vendor Special Class, and the present 3rd class rate should be the rate for Vendor Special Class in order promote this and to provide a decent travelling for the office crowd of Colombo, replaced with decent adequately seated compartments only for commuters.  

0530HRS to 0930HRS and 1630HRS 1900HRS be declared as workforce travel time CGR and schedule the trains for no-standing travel. CGR be prepared to release trains all seated according to the demand at the beginning of crucial but necessary changes– then reschedule it for passenger convenience only. Resource management of engines should play a crucial role for the success of this project.

You must ban or introduce system that shunts away the standing while travelling in a train whatever the distance for the best reasons of safety of a passenger, decency as well to be attractive. 

Whatever the distance the trains must have class deference, and each and every ticket issuing officer shall have the knowledge of strength, capacity and pros and cons of class variations of each train at his fingertips – this requires internal networking communication within among stations, this applies to short distance trains as well as long distance trains.  All coastal line trains particularly of those plying towards Galle, Matara and Necombo urgently requires decent seated compartments, I have seen tourists travelling up to Galle from Colombo Fort standing and I was also one of them who couldn’t not only find a seat, even could not stand properly due to overcrowding in a train that left Fort by 0935 and reached Galle 1330. These destinations should have trains every hour and be attractive too, just alone running condition wagon won’t do.   

It is laborious to implement the above, nevertheless the present crisis of transport system and the train commuters plight to-gather demands to come out of conventional systems of colonial period stigma of signal systems tracks and timing, revamping the entire system so as to accommodate more trains as many as every ten minutes for the suburb work force people travel back and forth to Colombo stress free so you naturally get an better out from them for any sector!  Quite obviously it demands a labour force and able supervisors for maintenance of track and modern alert systems, you have to eat a bitter pill to get rid of the ill, let that people have some money hard earned!! Even the Locomotives and engines that can power more wagons and compartments have to be looked for rather than adhering to the conventional system. Different sections of CGR should work in integration in targeting to achieve three objectives above said. Even the Station Masters and staffs shall come out of their conventional clout and may need to act readily alleviate the train delays and passenger difficulties through the knowledge modern information technology.

Just for loading and unloading in between destinations and just running between destinations we don’t need a system at the caliber of Ceylon Government Railways!