Last night, a train traveling from Rawalpindi to Lahore went off the tracks and fell into a ditch. It is now being blamed on sabotage.

Though the track record for Pakistan Railways has always been awful, with carriages seeming to date from the Raj era, I thought it had improved a lot lately. The ticket system had become more automated and old carriages have mostly been replaced with newer, Chinese-built ones. Trains, that used to be as much as 24 hours late, now arrived more or less on time and were relatively clean.

I think the only major threat to trains was from dacoits in more remote areas of Sindh, not around Northern Punjab. This act of sabotage could be politically motivated. God knows.