As Passenger Travel By Rail Marks 200th Anniversary, India Must Consider Upgrading Tracks

The new year begins with some good news on the economic front. Car sales for 2024 were higher than in 2023, even if only marginally. More significantly, entry-level car sales picked up in December, after a long gap, signalling a possible end to rural stagnation and the revival of economic growth.

The broader trends in geopolitics and geoeconomics will be shaped by what precise form president elect Donald Trump’s plans for higher tariffs, lower taxes and negative net migration take in the US and how other major players react to those plans. Some broad contours are visible, nevertheless.

Woe Is Europe

Europe is in the economic doldrums. The largest two economies, Germany and France, are beset by political instability, cyclical downturn and maladaptation to structural economic change. The European automobile industry seems to be set on a course to become pliant meat for the Chinese dragon. China — the government and the industry together — have invested heavily and strategically to gain a big lead in electric vehicles (EVs), and renewable energy. Chinese EV majors are organically and originally born into the world of electric mobility, not petrol and diesel car makers dragging themselves into the electric era.

Dragon’s Electric Flight

European legacy automakers are to Chinese EV makers as learners of a foreign language are to native speakers of the language. Northvolt, the Great European hope in the battery battle, filed for bankruptcy last year. BMW is trying to take the hydrogen-fuel-cell route to electric mobility, never mind that green hydrogen remains a tantalising hope, albeit a realistic one, as of now. Other big players are trying to shelter behind tariff walls, close factories and lay off workers to survive the Chinese assault. The European auto industry is more likely to be eviscerated than to painlessly morph into an electric avatar that can survive during the green transition. Whether it will rise again from its ashes like the mythical phoenix remains to be seen.

Putin Resurgent

The Ukraine war would be over, sooner rather than later, in 2025. Russia would insist on removal of the sanctions imposed on it, as part of the terms for ending hostilities. As Russia resumes normal supplies of gas and oil, Indian oil import prices would tick up marginally. Legal wranglings over Russian foreign assets that were frozen when Russia invaded Ukraine would continue, with fiscally constrained Europeans likely to demand that a portion, at least, of the reserves be used for reconstruction and rehabilitation in war-ravaged Ukraine.

Russian president Vladimir Putin would emerge stronger from the war, having defended Russia’s warm water naval base in Crimea against annexation by NATO, which is what would have happened, had Ukraine joined NATO. Even if Kiev had accepted the Russian annexation of Crimea, Russian forces’ access to the naval base from Moscow or St Petersburg would have been insecure without the parts of Eastern Ukraine that Russia has now occupied and is likely to retain after the war ends.

The grouping BRICS would emerge stronger, plans for depository and clearing facilities for financial assets outside the West-dominated institutions — BRICS Clear, a clearing facility sponsored and managed by BRICS entities, figured prominently at the Kazan summit earlier this year — would gather steam. A re-insurance arm for the BRICS-sponsored New Development Bank is more likely than ever.

Along With Boeing, Aerospace Duopoly Sputters

A bright spot for the European economy is in distant Seattle, Boeing. With the American end of the aerospace duopoly sinking deeper into a self-wrought technical morass, with the latest South Korean crash and near-crash of Boeing planes, Airbus will get additional business opportunities. Some east Asian or southeast Asian countries would purchase the China-made airliner Comac C919 for deployment in their domestic fleets for midrange commutes. Comac would launch bigger, wide-bodied commercial airliners. Over the next five years, the Boeing-Airbus duopoly would fade into memory.

Bicentenary Of Rail Travel

The year 2025 marks the 200th anniversary of passenger travel by rail. While horses used to drag heavy loads along parallel rails, initially of wood and later of steel, at the beginning of the industrial revolution, the arrival of steam locomotives changed transportation forever. On September 27, 1825, a locomotive built by George Stephenson pulled 11 wagons of people and 20 wagons of coal a distance of some 26 miles from Darlington to Stockton along steel tracks (these places are about two hours by car from Manchester). That inaugurated travel by rail.

Since then, trains have changed, themselves, and the world around them. In America, railroads extended the westward reach of the settlers on the East Coast, carried civilisation all the way to the Pacific Coast, and, along with it, ruin for the native tribes and bison. New rail magnates were minted, one of whom set up the Stanford University. Chinese immigrants moved in, to build the railroads and add colour to the patchwork of the world’s nationalities that together make up the United States. In India, railway construction had begun even before the 1857 revolt, but gained real momentum after it, because the colonial regime realised the importance of quick transport of men and materiel. Rail track and train service gradually extended to remote parts of the country, permitting Satyajit Ray to depict on film the linear, mechanical advance of a train across a lushly vegetated plain as the advent of modernity, in the wondrous eyes of Apu, a village lad, besides moving millions of Indians across the subcontinent for work and leisure, helping knit the country into a nation.

Rail track was laid across Europe. The Orient Express connected Istanbul to Paris, and played home to an ingenious murder mystery for Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s fictional detective, to solve. The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway allowed travel by rail from Calais, on the French Coast, to Vladivostok, on the continental coast of the Sea of Japan, which the Koreans simply call the East Sea, bristling at the Japanese appellation for this bit of geography. Americans landed their lend-lease supplies essential for Soviet resistance to Hitler’s march on the Iranian coast along the Persian Gulf, from where the Trans-Iranian Railway carried them to Russia and further on.

With the coming of air travel, trains would appear to have lost their utility for long-distance travel. But that appearance can be deceptive. The Chinese recently tested a train that travels at 450 km an hour. Japanese maglev trains reach a speed above 600 kmph. The current threshold to qualify as high-speed rail is 250 kmph. There is good reason to invest in high-speed trains, because trains are more energy efficient than other forms of transport. The International Energy Agency says that trains account for 8% of the passenger traffic and 7% of freight movement, but consume only 2% of the energy used up in transport.

In India, the main obstacle to achieving high speeds on rail is the poor quality of the track. India can buy or even build high-speed locomotives and coaches that can keep up. But the quality of the track does not permit trains to rush along at their full potential speed. This means laying fresh track, without level crossings, with straight alignment, complete with reinforced bridges and tunnels.

Metros for inter-city connectivity and rapid transit lines for connecting cities can do wonders to lower rentals for residences as well as homes, both of which can be spread out across the city and beyond, thanks to fast connectivity.

Movement of bulk cargo over long distances is best carried out over rail. There is a strong case for taking up track renewal and laying of fresh track along better, meaning linear rather than curvilinear, alignments, to boost growth, both via providing demand for investment and by increasing economic efficiency, once built.