No Pain, No Gain?

Last week, to mark the lunar new year, several hundred elderly South Koreans trekked northward to pay their respects to relatives they hadn't seen in 50 years. They rumbled by train up to a half-built railway station outside the demilitarized zone. There they disembarked, placed offerings of rice cakes and fruit atop a makeshift altar, lit incense and bowed before the rolls of barbed wire that are as close as they are likely ever to get to their kin in the North.

The two Koreas agreed to rebuild a rail link connecting Seoul and Pyongyang during a breakthrough summit in June 2000. Trains were supposed to start running a year ago. But the new track laid by the ...