Making sense of PNRWicked Winks
Melvin S. del Puerto
https://www.facebook.com/philippinerailways/photos/a.193033804058243/730513723643579/?type=1&theater< Edited >
Philippine National Railways (PNR), the same rail track gauge, better known as the “Cape Gauge” has since been maintained (track gauge is a measurement or spacing between rails). This gauge, measuring 3’ 6”is obsolete. Very few countries, among them Mozambique, Sudan, Sierra Leone in Southern and Central Africa, and parts of Australia and New Zealand still make use of it, but mostly for freight.
Although Japan still has this obsolete gauge in some of its limited provincial routes, it is now being upgraded to “Standard Gauge,” which measures 4’ 81/2” to accommodate high speed trains. All other railroads in the world, including the North Americas, Russia, Europe, and China had long converted their rails to Standard Gauge, not only for stability at high speed, but for universal design interchangeability.
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As an example, all LRT and MRT rail tracks use Standard Gauge while the PNR Commuter Train still runs on the old Cape Gauge. Apparently, their trains are incompatible in their respective rails besides their technical differences; the former runs on electricity and the latter is self-propelled diesel locomotive.
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The Southern rail tracks, composed of beat-up and decrepit rails, sleepers, ballast and sub-ballast shoulders, and track foundation can no longer sustain a relatively normal train speed of 100kph (the fastest test run on the short refurbished rail tracks in 2009 reached a speed of 100kph, but just for a few minutes). Until lately, the 300 km Manila to Naga run takes 12 hrs, but on rainy days where the rail foundation becomes softer, the train crawls for 14 hrs, or at an average speed of 21kph!
The whole Bicol Express rail tracks and bridges need to be reconstructed and refurbished, not just portions of them after decades of neglect to conform to the required safety specs for a respectable speed, otherwise, we are back to square one, where derailments and 21kph speed are the norms instead of exceptions.
But, even if the Bicol Express route is restored back to the early 70s condition when Naga to Manila took less than 7 hrs, where will the PNR get train replacements when its current obsolete Cape Gauge train inventories finally breakdown and become irreparable as all of them are reconditioned and refurbished 20-25-yr-old Japanese surpluses (PNR relies exclusively on Japanese train dole outs, the only country which still has repairable stocks of this train type which ran once in their provincial routes) and their remaining vestige 45-yr-old GE locomotives are decommissioned for lack of spare parts? These trains cannot run forever. When the national government finally coughs off billions of pesos for rehab to bring the tracks to A-1 condition, very few trains will ply the route, if none at all by the time the work is completed.
What is the best option then?
Obviously, the most sensible thing to do is to convert the present rail tracks to Standard Gauge. By doing so, PNR can avail of abundant supply of new and used trains from many countries where the same gauge trains are built and operated, and not be restricted and solely dependent on Japan’s dwindling Cape Gauge train left-overs.
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