3.1 Overview of transport in the State Railway of Thailand (SRT)
(1) Management conditions
Like other national railways of other countries, the SRT continues to experience difficulties, owing to the increase in automobiles and improvement of roads and airline routs.
The balance continued to be in the red for the past 10 years or more before 1994. However, since then related businesses started, their revenues are included into the revenues of the National Railway. Thus, the railway operation has remained deficit, although as a whole, the revenues of the SRT has turned profitable.
Table 3.1-1 indicates the changes of the SRT's balance of the last 5 years, while Table 3.1-2 indicates the operating balance of the SRT in 1993.
(2) Transport situation
1) Passenger transport
Table 3-1-3 indicates the situation of passenger transport. The passenger transport volumes on the increase since the 1970s have turned slow since the beginning of 1980s. When it came in 1994, the number of transport passengers reduced by 0.5 % over the previous year.
The average travel distance by the passenger of the SRT was as fairly long as 166.0 km while that of Japan was just 27.5 km. This indicates that the SRT is featured with inter-city transport rather than with commuter transport.
The passenger transport is classified into the 1st class, 2nd class, and 3rd class. The following table indicates the number of passengers by different class trains and travel distance in 1993. Some 94 % of the passengers use the 3rd class of inter-city train of relatively small distance.
