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by Chandani Jayatilleke

Traces of another era, a steam engine

The new management of Sri Lankan Railways is faced with the arduous task of putting the service back on track at the earliest.

The last few years recorded a severe decline in the railway service and the series of derailments which occurred recently is an indication of the decline suffered by the Railways during this period.

Sri Lanka Railways (SLR) is a popular mode of transport among the people. Though its main objective is to provide and operate rail services for the efficient carriage of persons and goods, the contribution of railway services to the country's overall passenger and freight transportation has not been significant.

At present the Railways transport over 210,000 passengers (per day) to the city which is a share of 6 percent of overall transport market in the country. The share has increased by about 2 percent during the last two years, as there was a shift in passengers from buses to trains mainly due to frequent increases in bus fares.

However, the present capacity in the railway is much lower than the required capacity, according to authorities. Moreover, the condition of the track network is critical. This is because the tracks have not been maintained and repaired on a regular basis over the last three years.

At end of 2003, the SLR owned only 130 locomotives and power sets for daily operations although it needed 153 locomotives to meet the demand.

There were 255 derailments and 585 locomotive failures in 2003, compared with 104 derailments and 620 locomotive failures in 2002.

Following a Government decision to curtail capital expenditure allocated to the Railway Department from Rs. 4.4 billion in 2001 to Rs. 1.6 billion in 2002 and Rs. 1.4 billion in 2003, the Railway did not have sufficient funds to carry out proper track maintenance work on time.

Insufficient investment on track maintenance, lack of locomotives and compartments, weak signalling systems, management inefficiency and overstaffing and increasing recurrent expenditure have contributed to the deterioration of rail services in the country.

However, no current expenditure was curtailed, because they are basically salaries and other expenses. It remained between Rs. 3 to 3.3 billion. Which means the country is spending around Rs. 5 billion for the Railways on an average.

The previous Government had plans to restructure and perhaps to privatise the Railway. It would have been one reason why capital expenditure was curtailed.

Even from the capital expenditure budget, a part was going as recurrent because the Railway had to pay allowances and subsistence fees in addition to salaries to its 16,400 workers.

Accordingly, the utilisation of capital expenditure has been 6 to 20 percent of the allocated funds and the recurrent expenditure has been 100 to 110 percent.

"To give a fillip to the Railway and take it out from the present poor situation, there should be an efficient recovery plan, Transport Ministry Secretary, Dr. D. S. Jayaweera said.

"I believe that there should be some kind of restructuring in the Railway Department. Firstly, we have to have a recovery plan. To address this issue, we have appointed a committee to prepare an action plan, a short-term action plan within the framework of long-term objectives and goals, he told the Daily News in an interview.

The Committee headed by Priyal de Silva, General Manager Railways consists of Dr. T.L. Gunaruwan, Senior Lecturer, University of Colombo, Chandra Embuldeniya, Former President, National Chamber of Commerce of Sri Lanka, W. W. Harrison, Senior Official of the Ministry of Transport, S.W. Munasinghe, Transportation Superintendent, SLR and H.A.K.K. Sanath, Planning Assistant, SLR.

The committee has been asked to prepare a 3 to 12 month short-term plan, three-year medium term plan and a seven-year long term plan, Dr. Jayaweera said.

The short term plan will set out strategies to assure passengers' safety, immediate rehabilitation of railway tracks and improvement of frequencies of locomotives and compartments. A committee member told the Daily News that their effort is to take the Railway out of its present, pathetic situation.

"We have identified areas for development on short, medium and long term basis coupled with value added areas for passengers in our report," he said.

The report is scheduled to be handed over to the Minister of Transport followed by a presentation today.

Further on immediate measures that have been taken with regard to the improvement of railway tracks, Dr. Jayaweera said, "we have also requested the GM Railway to identify the critical areas on railway tracks, so that we can immediately attend to these repairs."

Secondly we will take measures to assure the safety of all the tracks at the earliest. And we will be introducing a technical auditing system for signals for the first time in history.

"As a long-term plan, we will develop Ragama to a fully-fledged railway station as a measure to efficiently handle and to decrease traffic load. Another long-term plan we are working on is to introduce a modern railway service between the Katunayaka airport and Ratmalana."

That's not all. There should be mechanisms to make routine checks of the track condition and supervise the work.

Dr. Jayaweera said strong monitoring mechanisms will be implemented to do routine checks.

When the UPFA Government came to power, they proposed to repeal the Railway Authority which came into effect in July last year.

"The objective of the Railway Authority was to have a commercial culture in Railways and provide better facilities to both passengers and the workers. Unfortunately the Railway Authority did not do a good job," the Secretary said.

Wasn't there a protest from the workers against the setting up of the RA? "Well, I am not blaming the workers. At the beginning, they were happy with the idea - they thought it would help raise the standards of the Railway and the workers.

However, things didn't happen the way they expected. The Railway Authority and the Railway Dept, could not work in unison. The Authority had its own way," he said.

The Railway Authority is expected to be repealed shortly. A Cabinet paper is being prepared in this connection, he said.

Recalling previous derailments, Dr. Jayaweera said even in 2001 there was a large number of derailments. "And during that time, there was not even an insurance cover for the passengers.

As an official of the Transport Ministry, I personally brought this to the notice of the Authorities and later they implemented an insurance scheme," he said.

How would you see the Railway's future? "Well.. according to our plans, we want to make Railways an efficient transport system in this country with many value added services and to increase its market share to 20 percent from present 6 percent. Every cent we invest on Railways should benefit the passenger," Dr. Jayaweera said.

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