This week saw a horrific bus crash in southern Thailand with many deaths. For many destinations rail is an alterntive to road travel, however earlier in 2012 at train simply fell over.
Now the photos below taken along a 100 metre stretch of the railway passing through Sarapee en route to Chiang Mai cause us to wonder if maintenance of the State Railway of Thailand is up to standard.
Railway employees in the south went on strike long ago to demand proper maintence of dangerous rolling stock and now a question mark arises over the track as well. Need we wait for a deadly accident for the problems to be rectified?
Last week yet another train to Chiang Mai fell over as detailed in this commentary from the Bangkok Post and we agree with the pithy comment tere-in :”The high-speed project is just a distraction to lift the profile of the government.”
http://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/360955/srt-going-off-the-rails-as-aged-route-rots
Well, Ricky, you made exactly the pictures I could have shot over many times but a few will do the job. The German railways (and not only them) in the old days do had a so called: Streckenlaufer, a man with a hammer walking along the track and checking if every thing still is in place as it should be, especially the fastenings (point were the rail is attached to the sleeper) wouldn’t escape his eyes. I walked a lot of tracks here in the North, the only conclusion: this super infrastructure needs a complete overhaul and that means everything out, a new layer of ballast stones, new sleepers and new rail heavier than the existing ones. It doesn’t come for free but when invested worth the money. Dreaming about high-speed trains is only for boys their knickerbockers not outgrown. Politics and this means doing the right thing on the right time is something different. The decay of Thai Railways started earlier, it’s the point of no return whereupon things become visible and that point has come now!