Here's an idea for Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway if it does eventually offer the KCRC a diamond ring on bended knee: start promoting yourself as a Pearl River Delta transport operator. Just imagine the acronym: KCMTRCPRD.
Seriously, this is a detail that may be getting overlooked in the brouhaha over whether the MTR Corp's minority shareholders should accept the government's plan for its merger with the Kowloon-Canton Railway Corporation. Together, these two would become a dominant player in the market for integrating the world's most vibrant economic region.
In the fast-growing Pearl River Delta region, the two railways could escape the legacy that they'll have to sort out in Hong Kong - that of contrasting business models but overlapping interests. In this city, it will be hard for them to find operating synergies.
To be frank, they shouldn't really have to look for operating synergies. They should, by now, be two very different transport companies. The reason they are not is that the KCRC's natural evolution as an intercity train operator has been distorted since its founding, more than a century ago. Granted, the 1949 communist revolution had much to do with this. But ostrich-like behaviour in the hallways of government since the 1979 reopening of China has not helped, either.
What is painfully obvious in Hong Kong is that neither of the networks has been built with the cross-border picture as a priority. It was a stretch to get them to link up in Tsim Sha Tsui. The proposed Sha Tin-Central link should shave another 10 minutes off the trip from downtown to the Lowu border crossing. Whoopee.
And when you look at how the KCRC's West Rail loops around the western New Territories, as if a force field has repelled it away from the border with Shenzhen, it is hard to imagine what its designers were thinking.
The company is only now looking into the feasibility of the proposed Northern Link route, which would connect West Rail to the Lok Ma Chau border crossing.