It’s high time we began‘working on the railroad’!

The Philippine National Railways, let’s face it, was an accident waiting to happen.

All that finger-pointing by the politicians as to who and what were responsible for the derailment of the misnamed "Bicol Express" train in Padre Burgos, Quezon province won’t bring back the dead, heal the grievously wounded – and mollify the enraged public. However, our public is easily mollified – and both our leaders and our criminals (sometimes synonymous with each other) know it.

Where is the outrage over previous tragedies, like the blowing up of the SuperFerry, or the sinking of the MV Doña Paz, the worst maritime disaster in peacetime, with 4,000 victims sent many years ago to a watery grave – including my poor barber Paul and two of his sons who were returning to Manila from the Visayas after attending his own father’s funeral?

The Doña Paz lies on the seabed, not far from the wreck of the biggest Japanese battleship, the Musashi (sister ship of the gargantuan Yamato), which was sunk by US torpedo planes in the Sibuyan Sea.

Who remembers? Who’s weeping over the Paz’s dead?

When the Abu Sayyaf boasted one of its terrorists had sunk SuperFerry 14, throwing 900 hapless passengers into Manila Bay’s waters, killing more than 100, where was the nationwide revulsion? In contrast to the Spaniards, who marched angrily through their streets – even in driving rain – by the indignant millions to protest the bombing by Islamic militants (they originally thought the Basque ETA terrorists did it) of those Madrid trains in the Atocha station and nearby tracks (killing 200, injuring and maiming over 1,000), we Filipinos seem to shrug off terror attacks and tragedy with some tears, a short period of fury and recrimination, curses and prayers. Then we forget all about it.

This will happen, I fear with last Friday’s railway "mishap" which killed 10 (not 13, we "overkilled" them in The STAR) and left 160 men, women and babies, cruelly hurt and crippled.

It’s criminal that pilferers keep on prying loose segments of railway track and taking off with them to sell to larcenous buyers – both looters and their "fences" must be found and hung from the nearest tree.

Nobody, alas, gets hung, legally decapitated, or goes to the lethal injection chamber or the electric chair in this country. A host of bleeding hearts, human-rights lawyers, and kawawa-naman do-gooders immediately rush in to defend the crooks and rats. Never mind the victims. This is the wishy-washy Pinoy style which dooms us to Fourth World status and crime-ridden misery. Nobody gets punished.

Already, the demand is being made that the Armed Forces turn over Maj. Gen. Carlos Garcia to the Sandiganbayan so he can post bail and get out of detention.

"That is his right!" Many, from the DOJ to the corner Bar Association, are chorusing. Yeah. Nobody remembers that when our soldiers run out of bullets during a firefight, and get overrun by attacking rebels, it’s because some generals have dipped their sticky fingers in the ammunition budget. Sus, some of our soldiers, seeing corruption among the brass, while they’re poor and suffering, brazenly "sell" their firearms to the insurgents – without a thought to the probability they’ll get shot someday by the same weapon they stupidly passed on to the enemy.

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Was the train going too fast? Were the second-hand coaches we got (in aid) from the Japanese defective? Was the "river curve" the train was negotiating at top speed too sharp and dangerous? Had the Australians who were "fixing" the tracks in Quezon under a P1 billion contract negligent? Had the scavengers ripped away some meters of track?

"Accidents don’t happen," it used to be our motto in the Philippine Safety Council. "They are caused."

The PNR’s being decrepit has many causes. After the hue and cry, the breast-beating, and the angry denunciations, the situation will resort to normal – SNAFU (Situation Normal, All Fouled Up – as they said in wartime). For Heaven’s sake: the symbol of our indifference is the fact that we sold our central railroad station, the Tutuban Station in Divisoria, to a Malaysian developer, who turned it into a shopping mall. Who’ll get us back the old Tutuban, from where we used in our younger days to undertake so many train journeys, up north to San Fernando (La Union), Damortis our "connection" to Baguio City, or south to Legaspi, Albay, and the rest of Bicol? Even the Dilao station in Paco is much under-used.

Now, some opposition senators and congressmen are attempting to stop the Chinese-funded North Rail project because they claim it’s "overpriced". Sanamagan! Build the railroad first, gentlemen – then let’s argue about it.

We’re the sort of dopes who derail a train set-up even before the first meter of track is laid by endless investigations, talk of chicanery, and typhoon blasts of hot air. Just look at the Light Rail Transit. The building of what’s now called the Metrostar, the light rail transit which serve scores of thousands daily – they’re so packed we need more trains – was delayed for more than three years because one Senator had the fixation that it was "overpriced". After the stonewalling in the Senate committee finally petered out, he even went to Court to stop the undertaking. By the time the project was resurrected, the original investors and creditors had lost their shirt, and that LRT’s completion had cost four times more!

Let’s get things done, finally, in this benighted country – where endless TROs, writs of injunction, congressional inquiries, and continuous carping stall every investment, enterprise and project.

Let last Friday’s disgraceful disaster be investigated. But we must learn from it, not just reap grandstanding headlines and TV hoopla from it. Train disasters recently occurred in England, Germany, Switzerland and France, all of them advanced countries, long experienced in railroads and featuring the most modern high-speed trains. Even Japan’s renowned Bullet Train, the Shinkansen, was recently derailed, but this time by earthquake.

In the Philippines, the only earthquakes bothering the railways are engendered by the environment being rocked by tsunamis of useless rhetoric and insult emanating from both chambers of our Congress.

And the railroad’s progress is impeded by thousands of squatters stubbornly occupying the railroad right-of-way! C’mon. What we need is the political will to remove and resettle them. Even demolish those stupid bahay-along-da-riles buildings established by former President Fidel V. Ramos – I argued with him in Malacañang about them when he was President, intent on appeasing 20,000 squatters at the expense of the transportation needs of millions of Metro Manila would-be train commuters.

All this "populism" is what makes our people a deprived and chronically poor nation. The short-term "happiness" of a few, exchanged for the long-term welfare and progress of many millions.

Let’s build our railroads. They are the backbone of any economy, the spine of progress. Then we can debate their cost and any "shenanigans" afterwards.

We always seem to put the cart before the horse. Indeed, we sell the horse to the glue factory and the cart for firewood.

Whatta "strong" Republic!