PNR revival of the Bicol express: The region’s ticket to prosperity
So, the Philippines is thinking about finishing its railway. We’ve been here before—a lot of talk, blueprints, and groundbreakings that led to nowhere. A skeptic, looking at the long, troubled history of infrastructure in the archipelago, would be forgiven for a shrug.
Let’s suspend disbelief for a moment. Let’s talk about what would happen if they laid tracks from Camarines Norte to Sorsogon. It’s not just about trains, it’s about the hidden, and often surprising, logic of economic geography. It’s what happens when you finally give a thirsty region a drink.
First, a lesson from economic geography: location isn’t everything—it’s almost everything. For decades, the Bicol region has been a case study in what we call a “periphery.” Its economy is shaped by high connection costs. Getting a sack of abaca or a box of pili nuts from a farm in Sorsogon to a port in Manila is a slow, expensive, and uncertain journey along a highway that is, to be charitable, overburdened. This friction acts as a heavy tax on everything Bicol produces and on everyone who might want to invest there.
Now, imagine slashing that friction. A functional railway from Daet to Sorsogon isn’t just a line on a map; it’s a machine for reducing costs. The immediate effect is simple: farmers get their goods to market faster and cheaper, and tourists from Manila find it easier to visit the beaches of Matnog or the whale sharks of Donsol. This is the standard—boring, but not-wrong—narrative of infrastructure. It boosts productivity in existing sectors. Call it the straightforward return on investment.
But the interesting part—the part that gets an economist like me excited—isn’t the direct effect. It’s the second-order consequences, the emergence of what we call “increasing returns.” A railway creates a linear city—a corridor of economic activity. Suddenly, small factories or logistics hubs no longer belong just anywhere—they belong near stations in Iriga, Ligao, or Sipocot, where transportation is cheapest.
We’ve seen it from the American Midwest in the 19th century to the corridors of Europe and Japan today. The railway changes the calculus of location. A businesswoman in Naga is no longer just serving Naga; she is suddenly plugged into a supply chain that stretches from the mining towns of Camarines Norte to the fishing ports of Sorsogon. The market potential for her products just exploded. This is how you get the magic of agglomeration—where people and ideas clump together and generate innovation and growth that wouldn’t be possible if they were scattered.
Then there’s the labor market. A talented kid in a town in Albay might face a long, costly, soul-crushing daily commute or relocating to crowded, expensive Manila. The railway smashes that binary choice, creating what urban economists call a “commuter shed”—a vast area from which people can easily access multiple job centers. This doesn’t just give workers more choice; it gives employers in Legazpi or Naga access to a larger pool of talent. The human capital of the region becomes more fluid, productive, and valuable.
Will this happen? The gap between the blueprint and the finished track is a gorge filled with political pitfalls, budgetary constraints, and the difficulty of building big things in the 21st century. The vested interests of the bus and trucking industries will howl. The political will may falter.
The restoration of the Bicol Express isn’t a nostalgia trip. It is a powerful, proven tool for reshaping economic geography. It’s about replacing the heavy tax of distance with the dividend of connectivity. A real, working railway from end-to-end would be a declaration that its future is finally about what it can.
Manny Ilao,
manny.ilao@yahoo.com
