Waiting for the Electric Trains

January 20, 2016, 8:25 pm 

by Ananda Wanasinghe

I now live in crowded Colombo with its dust, noise and bustle. Travel by bus takes 45 minutes to cover the five miles from Pamankada to Fort; much slower than that steam train 60 years ago. If development proceeded as projected in 1952, I would not have left those verdant, bird infested surroundings of Bemmulla with its beautiful stretches of green paddy fields and meandering streams of gurgling waters.

Tears welled up in my eyes as I read Dr. Tilak Siyambalapitiya's letter in The Island of Jan. 4, which held out fresh hope for railway electrification. It took me back 63 years to 1952, when my father took me, a twelve-year old, at that time, to the Colombo Plan Exhibition which was about the development plans for Ceylon after Independence.

To us, the most attractive of the exhibits was the one on the projected electrification of the railways. There were little electric trains busily running between Panadura and Veyangoda, just as in the first stage of the plan described by Dr. Siyambalapitiya. There was to be a train every 10-15 minutes in both directions. At that distant time no more than ten trains a day in each direction stopped at Bemmulla. My father and I were fascinated with what we saw. We watched with pride as the little trains stopped at the Bemmulla station on its way to Veyangoda and back.

We lived a mere five-minute walk from the station––or a minute's sprint across neighbourhood gardens for me to catch the train to school! At the time there were no buses servicing Bemmulla and we had to travel by train. The smoke spewing steam engines, stopping at all seven stations in between, took well more than an hour to drag a train the 19 miles to Colombo. What a great time would we have after electrification when we could get to Colombo in the promised less than 30 minutes?

For years thereafter my father lived in the hope that electric trains would be running in a few years. It never happened. He died 25 years later without realising his dream. For about 15 years during the 1970s and 1980s I had to travel daily to Colombo for work by train. By this time office trains arriving at Bemmulla were always over-crowded. It was quite an effort to get into them. There was no hope of getting a seat unless a friend offered his seat for a while. Camaraderie developed among regular travellers who formed into groups that always travelled in the same compartment. There were so many people that, even in a group, one was always pressed against two or three others. Yet, the conversation within the group made the travel somewhat bearable. Even a semi-express train took more than an hour to get to Colombo. The picture of the busy little electric trains always remained at the back of my mind.

Dr. Siyambalapitiya places the first operation of electric trains in the Panadura-Veyangoda sector five years away in 2021. Now, for me, well past the biblically allotted three score and ten, and not being in the best of health, this seems a very distant prospect indeed. I don't even dream of it!

I hope that Dr. Siyambalapitiya's prediction comes through and the people who made sacrifices to win the war but continue to suffer in suburban travel, get the benefits of railway electrification, sooner than later. I now live in crowded Colombo with its dust, noise and bustle. Travel by bus takes 45 minutes to cover the five miles from Pamankada to Fort; much slower than that steam train 60 years ago! If development proceeded as projected in 1952, I would not have left those verdant, bird infested surroundings of Bemmulla with its beautiful stretches of green paddy fields and meandering streams of gurgling waters. And if destiny permits; sometime in the future, I may even hear on a silent night, mixed with the rhythmic calls of a pair of owls, the soft whoosh of an electric train braking to a halt at the nearby station.