A security guard pointing a gun at your chest may not be a perk of first-class travel in the West, but it’s all part of the service on Pakistan’s gleaming Business Express.
Thirteen carriages have been lovingly restored into a sleek sleeper to ply the 1,200km between Pakistan’s two biggest cities, Lahore and Karachi, on an 18-hour journey that once used to take upwards of 30 hours.
Presided over on Friday by Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, perhaps keen to front a good-news story as he faces contempt of court charges, and waved off by excited crowds, it is Pakistan’s most luxurious and expensive train.
Photo: AFP
For 5,000 rupees one way (US$55), or 9,000 rupees return, passengers are waited on by a bevy of attentive stewards, as they settle down to watch films on flat-screen TVs or power up laptops.
Afternoon tea and piping hot dinner — courtesy of chefs at five-star hotels — are borne into cabins as uniformed guards carrying rifles in the corridors are a reminder of a country troubled by kidnappings, Taliban and al-Qaeda violence.
Then, as night falls, stewards come round with crisp bed linen to turn slightly hard green bunks into inviting beds.
It’s all part of a first private investment of millions of rupees in the ailing state railways, billed as the last hope of preventing a much-loved relic of British rule from falling into ruin.
Corruption, mismanagement and neglect have driven Pakistan Railways to the brink. Since Gilani’s government took power in 2008, the group has retired 104 of 204 trains in a country larger than Britain and Germany combined.
It relies on handouts of US$2.8 million a month just to pay salaries and pensions, and faces expected losses of US$390 million in the current fiscal year.
However, the new train pulled away five minutes early and customers boarded from a brand-new business lounge at Lahore station. Decorated in tinsel, the engine then ground to a halt 10 minutes later to pick up more passengers.
Mariyam Imran, a strikingly beautiful young adviser for cosmetics firm L’Oreal, is delighted. A frequent traveler and terrified by a recent emergency landing on increasingly precarious state airline PIA, she is an avid convert.
“It’s beautiful. It’s relaxing, compared to the trains before. I’m so happy and very comfortable. The staff are good. It’s a marvelous train,” the 22-year-old young mother said.
Traveling with her businessman husband, three-year-old daughter and sister-in-law, they are heading to Karachi for a short break before returning to host a Valentine’s Day party at home in Lahore on Feb. 14.
“I hate PIA. Oh my God, that emergency landing. Compared to the plane, this train is best. The service is very good,” she said.
Gilani congratulated staff on what he called a “deluxe” and “state of the art” service that would serve as a trail blazer for future private-public partnerships capable of turning around Pakistan’s depressed economy.
“It’s a big, big initiative from the private sector, which we have welcomed with open arms,” Pakistan Railways chairman Arif Azim said.
Years of decline saw customers flock to airlines and luxury coaches.
Azim hopes that if the Business Express, and a similar service to be rolled out on Feb. 20 between Lahore, the textiles center of Faizalabad and Karachi, are a success, then investors will sink millions more into saving the railways.
“The sky’s the limit, because we’re in a pretty bad shape. We need a totally new fleet. Seventy-five percent of our wagons can be described as vintage,” he said.
Retired journalist Ishtiaq Ali is taking his young, second wife home after a two-week holiday to show her snow for the first time in Murree, a resort in Pakistan’s foothills of the Himalayas.
“Oh my goodness, what the hell are you talking about?” he jokes when asked how the new train compares with the best rail services in the West. “It’s impossible. There’s no education, there’s no security, there’s no insurance. In Pakistan, you can go outside and you can be held at gunpoint.”
It may not be the Orient Express, but his young wife smiles as she edges out of Lahore, speeding past clapped-out carriages shunted onto sidings.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing