Expensive railway lessons from Terengganu's past
ROSLI KHAN28 Sep 2022 05:40pm
Ongoing ECRL construction work at Kota Bahru. - Bernama pic
For the benefit of readers who assumed that Terengganu never had any railways, please read on.
The first railway in Terengganu was built by a British mining company, Eastern Metal and Mining Company (EMMCo), immediately after the 2nd World War ended.
This line connected the iron mines of Bukit Besi to the coastal town of Dungun, a distance of 28 miles. At Dungun, the ores were loaded onto waiting bulkers via a conveyor jetty system.
Dungun was then a booming town of about 85,000 population, frequented often by both mine workers and ship crew.
When the mine became exhausted in the early 1970s, the privately owned EMMCo offered to sell the railways, built on state land, to the Terengganu state government.
The plan was to turn it into public services, with the possibility to expand the rail lines to cater to public transportation for the state. But the state refused the offer.
So, eventually, the line together with the wagons and coaches was dismantled and sold for scraps.
This chapter on the mine closure marked the decline of Dungun town and it never recovered till today.
Kerteh Railway
In the mid-1990s, a plan was devised to connect a new oil town, Kerteh, (35 km south of Dungun), where Petronas lands their crude oil and gas from offshore Terengganu, to Kuantan, an upcoming port serving the East Coast.
A meter gauge railway line of 75 km was later built from Kerteh industrial complex, where Petronas runs a small refinery, to Kuantan port, Pahang.
It was planned and built by Petronas at a cost of more than RM800 million, started in 1997 and completed in 2003.
The project consisted of a single-track railway, bridges, grade-separated crossings, multi-modal facilities, rolling stocks, rail yard, radio communications systems, signaling systems, maintenance workshop, handling equipment and buildings
The consultants appointed by Petronas were Canarail, a foreign company from Canada and a well-known local consultant based in PJ.
It has been reported that upon completion, several failures were detected. Slope stability was one of the major ones.
Erosion of the slope, erosion of the embankment, and poor or uneven settlement of the base formation, due to improper drainage design and construction, were singled out as the major faults.
Improper slope protection, weak filled material within the embankment slope, improper compaction of the replaced materials, and improper compaction of the side slopes of the track, were discovered throughout the entire length of this single-track railway.
In simple terms, the entire civil works were not just mediocre but poorly built and supervised.
It was claimed by those who benefited financially from the contracts, that weather played a big part in the erosion process.
The railway had various operational problems, whereby services had to be operated at a much lower speed, well below the design speed.
The entire rail track became underutilised and goods that were meant to be transported by this railway, reverted back to road transport.
Kerteh railway, as it was called, started operation on 1st April 2004. Yes, this wasn't an April Fool anecdote.
But somehow, it became apparent, that the rail operation looked set to be closed down. Eventually, it did, completely locking, stocks and barrels on 17th November 2010.
Inflated Costs
The poor landowners in Terengganu (359 in total) were poorly compensated in the first place.
Not only they lost their landed properties, through compulsory acquisition by Petronas, but when the project was eventually abandoned, they were also overlooked and never given the chance to get their land back.
Instead of rectifying the problem, the railway was abandoned for nearly 10 years.
An afterthought was seen to be in play recently, when certain sections were re-considered and demolished to make way for yet, another railway infrastructure project, the infamous ECRL.
This new single-track line is a likely candidate for another white elephant in Terengganu.
The wasted RM800 million fund paid for Kerteh railway, was a tidy sum way back in the 1990s. Many schools or houses could be built in Terengganu, from such a wasted government fund.
At a cost of RM10.6 million per km then, one could wonder, how much the current ECRL would actually cost.
Even if the current cost estimate were to triple the amount, a 665km single-track rail line, between Kelantan and KL, would not cost more RM22 billion.
Where did we go wrong in the allocation of public funds?
Indeed, we have gone through many expensive lessons in dealing with railway projects over the years.
Sad to note, it was all implemented under government funds and supervision.
Rosli Khan, a PhD holder in Transport Economics from Cranfield University, England has over 30 years of experience in the transport industry. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Sinar Daily.
