The Light Rail Transit

Last Sunday I decided to take the family out for a ride on the Light Rail Transit (LRT) from Kelana Jaya to Suria KLCC for a bit of window shopping. The whole reason such a trip came about was due to the fact my 2 and a half year old daughter hadn’t been on a train before and it was the easiest example of a train to hop on with such short notice. Being a 2 year old, she enjoyed it. Being a 34 year old, it didn’t matter much at all whether I was in a train or not.

But, it got me thinking about trains overall. I was born in Taiping, Perak. A small town that is in the Malaysian history books for a lot of firsts. Taiping was the first capital of the state. It was also the place where the first railway tracks were laid, 1885, and it connected Taiping with Port Weld (now due to some beauracrats it’s now named Kuala Sepetang). It's main purpose was to send the tin mined around Taiping to the port and it was along this track where an elephant decided to try out how strong his skull was by ramming head on into a locomotive. It caused the first derailment in Malaya and also the first real death partly caused by trains (obviously the elephant died and had no insurance whatsoever).

Now trains in those days were big old steel steam engines and they smelt of water vapour, steam and soot. I suppose if you wore white, you might be covered in soot if the wind blew the smoke from the steam engine’s chimney and travel in them took slightly longer than watching your 2 year old girl reach 4. But one thing it had was character or a soul if you see things in Jeremy Clarkson’s view. I was lucky to have had the opportunity in the mid 1980s to ride a steam engine in Taiping for the Malaysian Railway’s 100^th Anniversary and it was an experience to remember.

The steam engine spews smoke, steam, soot and made chug-chug sounds while moving. It had more curves and crannies than most modern trains. A cylinder for the engine mated to a box for the engineer’s cabin. A coal car for carrying their coal which these trains burn as fuel. Now how romantic would travelling through the countryside by train be?

Coming back to the LRT. It is a characterless object that is used to transport people from one destination to another. There is nothing romantic about it at all, unless someone actually proposed to his or her partner inside an LRT, the scale of the LRT being romantic is negative 5 million.

But I like it. I like it for the fact that when I drive, I know that there are less people commuting on the road; therefore, there is less stress for me during my commute to and from the work place. I like it for the fact that it’s an engineering achievement made during the time of our former Prime Minister. He believed in its purpose for existing and if it weren’t for his commitment and vision, Kuala Lumpur will be in a constant jam throughout the day. Lots of critics at one time condemned this project as a failure, but look who’s laughing now? It’s the person who pushed the project through in the first place. Because it’s actually useful to the general public and monetary wise, it is actually breaking even these days. The only reasons one should hate taking the LRT is that there are pickpockets and some people do not use deodorant at all and smell worse than a rotting elephant.

This is one example of how a soulless, characterless machine assists men throughout their daily lives. But when it comes to cars, you should buy one with some character, and not because you want to get from A to B. Why should you buy something with character? You’re paying for it with your hard earned money for God’s sake. It’s not paid by someone else. That’s the biggest reason to do so.