Letter from Manila - Santol - of course!

It was indeed, but take some solace that his mighty city lives on, right here, right now!

Sooo, what happened yesterday? Well, we have a STRATEGY! Sounds grand doesn’t it? I can’t say too much as it’s pretty Priv and Con but I approve of it, and although on the face it’s a further delay, it could actually speed up the process over the next weeks. So whilst not exactly full steam ahead, then we are definitely stoking the boiler now.

In the meantime, whilst that’s on hold a little while, one of the partner consultants on the team has been doing a bit of digging regarding alignment.

One of the big issues here, and has been all along, is the terminally hopeless DOTC and now they’ve got themselves all fired up about the North-South Rail Project (coming to a station near you – for the last 20 years!). This is another DOTC, doomed to fail, PPP project and the plan is to basically privatise the southern half of PNR and at the same time, slot in a high frequency commuter line along exactly the same alignment as we are on, and this is where it gets interesting.

“Ooh, all very nice” I hear you cry, and yes, on the face of it, it may be, but…

It is being planned on wildly optimistic passenger forecasts, and I do mean wildly (one report I’ve seen estimates they are over double likely reality) but that’s the DOTC for you. If they’ve paid for something, they believe it and truth be damned. It’s going to be massively expensive and no-one, as yet, has been able to quantify the realistic benefits. Part of the problem is that the alignment may have been fine in 1892, but as Manila has developed, it now doesn’t go to where it’s target audience wants to. But hey, it’s new, bright, sparkly and there’s the opportunity for lots of free Mercedes to come out of it. 

Now that in itself shouldn’t be an issue. The original plan was to have the whole 50-odd kilometres elevated (hence the massively expensive) so basically they’d be out of our way and we’d have pretty much dedicated tracks for our freight, apart from a two or three times weekly long haul passenger. Nice and simple, huh?

Erm, no. The latest plan shows the line going up and down like a Ermita whore’s drawers, flitting back and forth between elevated and at grade – so only hugely expensive then. Unfortunately, the guy doing the design must have slipped with the tracing paper as all the bits shown at grade are in areas that almost must be elevated and those elevated could, at a pinch, be at grade. In addition, some of the elevated sections will need to be 40 or so metres in the sky. Oh, dearie, dearie me.

I did ask my colleague if he thought the DOTC could actually present this as feasible. without the audience thinking it was a comedy turn. It really is that bad. 

Anyway, the upshot being is that we now have several sections where I’ll need to try and incorporate the two services on the same tracks but obviously, as this thing bobs up and down like an Alton Towers ride, there’s no consistency as there would be if we shared the whole distance, and I’ve now got several junctions, with associated clearance times to take into account, as we try to avoid hundreds of empty commuter trains and, ideally, run non-stop at the same time.

Still, I’ve got 7-10 day’s work there building new run-time models for commuter and freight and then overlaying them to see what we can do to make it work. Pays the bills, doesn’t it?

The annoying reality is that we’ll be up and running long before the DOTC ever bring this even close to any sort of fruition and working on the “First come, first served” principle, it’ll all become someone else’s problem!