Stuart Wolfendale

A child at Christmas on a tricycle from Santa with a lollipop in its mouth is no happier than me with the prospect of a new train to ride.

Yet even with massive kiddy sentiment in favour of trains over vulgar buses, grumpy ferries and humiliating airplanes, I am having great difficulty in getting up any head of steam over the Hong Kong express rail link. I am trying hard to follow the government’s track on this one and every time I stop to think, I’m derailed.

Of course, the government is saying to me , ‘Don’t stop, silly boy. You aren’t’ an ‘after Eighty’, are you? Keep going at about 200 kmph and for God’s sake have faith. We have to spend HK$66 billion or we will lose HK5 million a day. If we stop to think, we will be disconnected from China, destiny and Mainland business people in silk underwear who will bring us great riches. Every day from now that we don’t have trains scooting through the NT at the speed of light is a day lost to poverty, provincialism and distance from the great white light’

Has anybody noticed how, after  the government discovered that the train was not actually going to Guangzhou at all,  the simple story of a  faster train there suddenly transformed itself into an epic tale of a great link to the Mainland’s super fast network.

Not once has anybody who knows about railways been rolled out onto the 6.30 news  to explain whether all the trains will come to a grinding halt at Panyi station and everyone will have to change or will at least some of them have ‘Wuhan’ and ‘Nanjing’ on the front right from Kowloon and go straight there? Even if the Mainland network moves like Mercury over its vast provinces, why do trains from Kowloon have to go like a bat out of hell over our bit of urban handkerchief? Can they ever get out of second gear? Will they not go through brake pads like Madonna does men?

Are permanent secretaries required to tell us about these things or are the entitled to talk purely in terms of visions? I am not convinced that these nervy, petulant civil servants and executive councilors know a train from a toothbrush. Their track record on the matter is, shall we say, buckled.

They breezily overestimated the use of the Airport Express so that there are a couple of football fields of space wasting away behind locked doors at Chek Lap Kok. The demand for the MTR’s Lok Ma Chau spur is so weedy, they close it shortly after sunset. There is not as much call as they hoped for chuffing up to Ma On Shan either. If the government’s ‘experts’ on the express link turn out to be MTR managers, it will be taking advice from a property company which was given a train set to play with.

Inevitably, property and gross profits from it are involved. A vast railway station is to be built on the West Kowloon development so the Chinese businessmen in silk undies can get off trains and cross straight into the opera. Above, extortionately costly bricks and mortar will have been piled to toppling point by the usual developer suspects. Underneath will be a Persepolis of shopping malls in one of which will open the city’s millionth designer label ladies’ dress shop.

This is one of the reasons why the ‘after Eighties’ crowd hate this project so much. But the station has to be there in that way because there will need to be a big depot for the trains, says Eva Cheng, talking straight through her mandarin’s fan. Can we please be told what exactly has to go into this ‘big depot’? Do all the carriages and engines get put to bed there at night? Will shunting diesels be kept down there along with track maintenance rolling stock? Will engineering workshops all be underground in reclaimed land at the bottom of Kowloon?

Why must such a massive empire of kit be stacked down there in cavernous sheds just to run trains up 30 minutes of a network that stretches over thousands of miles? Do any of these twitchy officials have any mental picture of what they are saying?

A rather obvious solution suggests itself. Give this to China Railways to build and run. They could house the depot somewhere on their side of the boundary. All the backstage mess could be set up in the corrupted fields of south Guandong. Their trains would run people in and out of an altogether neater station in Kowloon. They can build shops and shoe box flats on the top of it too if they want.

Most local people I have talked to believe that the link really is for the little emperor businessmen  from the great white light who want to be delivered at speed into Kowloon without having to break their  doze.  That being so, let China Railways sort it out. I am looking forward to the women in the opaque beige stocking with the big tin thermos flasks right from the very start