IRFAN Husain’s article ‘Railways on life support’ (Oct 22) is nostalgic and saddening. It is unfortunate to see the Pakistan Railways turn into Pakistan ‘Failways’.

The Pakistan Railways was once the North Western Railways of British India.

In 1925, the North Western Railways established a training school at Layallpur, the present-day Faisalabad. In 1930, this was shifted to a purpose-built campus named Walton Training School after Col. Sir Cusach Walton who headed the railways back then. Lahore’s famous suburban area owes its name to this institution.

The rich British legacy ensured such high standards that in 1954 its premises were selected by the Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE), a UN agency, to establish a ‘United Nations Regional Training Centre in Railway Operations and Signalling’ to impart training to railway officers and senior supervisors of Asian and African countries.

According to the mutual agreement, the training centere was taken over by the government of Pakistan in 1958. UNESCAP replaced ECAFE in 1974.

The commencement of the decay of the Pakistan Railways mentioned by Mr Husain can be corroborated by the bureaucratic makeovers suffered by the Walton Training School in the early 1980s.

In 1982 the Walton Training School was renamed as the Pakistan Inter-Regional Railway Training College. Somewhere along the way, new institutions named ‘Research and Development Centre’ and ‘Institute of Railway Management’ were made.

In 1983 the newborn institutions were merged with the Walton Training School to establish the ‘Directorate of Research and Training’. In 2000, the Directorate of Research and Training was renamed as the Pakistan Railway Academy. The institution kept losing its international appeal over the years.

Most statistics presented today are ‘uptodate’ (cumulative figures) in order to take advantage of its glorious past, such as ‘since inception the school has catered to 1,753 trainees from over 40 countries’. Much more dismal but relevant would be year-by-year numbers of foreign students trained during the past five years.

With a heavy heart but for the sake of the safety of human lives, I sincerely hope that the Far Eastern Railways are not having their ‘railway officers and senior supervisors’ trained in ‘Signalling and Advanced Railway Operations’ at Walton anymore.

The consequences of sole reliance on such training for implementation in state-of-the-art technological environments and the fast speeds of Chinese, Japanese and Korean locomotives can be nightmarish.

ADIL MULKI Karachi