KARACHI:
Moving cargo by rail costs a fraction of what it costs by road, consumes far lesser fuel per ton carried, and causes negligible wear on public infrastructure. Yet year after year, a shrinking share of Pakistan’s freight moves by train, while an ever-growing convoy of heavy trucks and trailers dominates our highways. The result is visible to anyone who travels the N-5 or M-series motorways: cracked surfaces, sunken lanes, and roads that need resurfacing far sooner than their design life would suggest. The public ends up paying twice — once through higher logistics costs embedded in the price of goods, and again through taxes spent on repairing roads that heavy axle loads have battered.
Why does this imbalance persist? Part of the answer lies with Pakistan Railways itself. Ageing locomotives, insufficient wagons, unreliable transit times and poor last-mile connectivity to industrial hubs and ports have pushed shippers toward road transport, whatever the cost. A truck can be booked on demand and delivers door to door; a goods train, in practice, often cannot compete on flexibility or reliability, even though it should win easily on price.
But part of the answer also lies with policy. Successive governments have invested heavily in motorways while allowing the rail freight network to stagnate. Diesel and toll pricing rarely reflect the true cost that heavy vehicles impose on road infrastructure, so trucking remains artificially attractive. Meanwhile, Pakistan Railways has not been given the sustained investment or the operational autonomy needed to modernise its freight business, expand its wagon fleet, or build proper freight corridors linking factories, dry ports and seaports.
Pakistan Railways and the Ministry of Railways must be asked: what concrete steps are being taken to win back bulk freight — cement, coal, fertiliser, containers — from the roads? Is there a plan to modernise the freight fleet, improve transit reliability and offer competitive, guaranteed schedules to industry? And is the government willing to correct the price signals — through axle-load enforcement and fairer road-user charges — that currently favour trucks over trains, even when trucks damage the very roads we all depend on?
Until these questions are answered, we will keep paying for a choice that makes little economic sense: expensive, road-damaging transport chosen not because it is better, but because the cheaper alternative has been left to decay.
Zafar Ahmed Khan
Islamabad
