Amongst the usual rose-tinted spectacles, there have been a few rather more gritty memories of the SAR posted on the
sar-L recently.
Paul wrote:It's always interesting to get another perspective on the SAR but the railway
you and... others remember is not the SAR I remember and I guess we don't
share the same longing for it.
One of my most vivid memories of the SAR is my old man struggling to prise his
containers out of the Railway's inefficient clutches at City Deep where they had
been languishing for twice as long as it had taken for them to travel from
Europe.
And by the time I was travelling by train in the mid-80s, the food was usually
sub-par and the timetable had already been cut to the bone. Still, I had some
good train trips but the days of white tablecloths and heavy SAR cutlery were
already past.
I pretty much missed the entire spectacle of late-80s SAR and industrial steam
(too busy chasing girls at Wits to get out to Lothair, Bethlehem, De Aar and the
gold and coal mines - a small regret to dwell on sometimes...)
Still, I used to love our long family car journeys because we would invariably
end up pacing trains in the Karoo near Beaufort West or Kimberley or watching
freights set off for Lootsberg from Middelburg. Of course that's all gone - the
branch lines are basically bust and I have my doubts whether they are worth
saving.
On the other side of the coin, I have seen first-hand some of the good side of
Transnet Freight Rail. I rode an ore train to Saldanha last year. OREX is
world-class, a seriously impressive operation, and fascinating to see from the
cab of a loco at the sharp end of a 40 000-tonne train, even if the 15Es
themselves are as ugly as sin.
I also managed to get a full-day footplate ride on the old NCCR, aboard a class
33 to boot, and rode all the way from Voorbaai to Worcester. It was an
illustrative comparison to the Ore Line. Traffic is thin and the locos are old
(when the temp in the cab hit 40 degrees, the lead loco shut itself down and we
sat in the veld near Mowers waiting for a fitter to come from Worcester). There
are a good number of potential customers online but until the government and
business take on the road freight lobby, single wagon load freight is bust in
this country. Still, the scenery was magnificent and it was a pleasure to have a
pukkah "shortline", backwoodsy railroad experience.
Traffic on TFR is up, and ja, the new model has no room for country stations,
rural branch lines or mixed freights. It's weird to see crews being swapped by
minibus in the middle of nowhere, and sad to know that junctions like
Springfontein hardly have any humans left because the yard is now controlled
from Bloem.
Branch lines aside, these changes do not show a neglectful company. The writing
was on the wall for the Railways long before the permit system was scrapped in
the 80s. I believe it was a combination of complacency, inefficiency and
straightforward economics that lost this country its widespread rail network,
and all the wishful thinking in the world and calls for "freight to return to
rail" are not going to bring it back.
I love the idea of a vibrant shortline network run by private mom-and-pop
operators, but truth is these lines need customers and traffic volumes. I think
in the US, the formula for a viable shortline is something like 100 wagons per
mile per year, and that's in a heavily industrialised nation. Our rural branch
lines just don't cut it.
Railways elsewhere in Africa have lately been (and in some countries still are)
protected by poor road networks. However, I won't forget in a hurry the day the
senior rail consultant for a large US NGO working in southern Africa telling me
that perfect transport solution for Africa was ...... the truck.
Geoff wrote:I'm with you on this.
I remember when I arrived in SA in 1982 that although there were steam locos, which was great, the rest of the railway seemed to be something from the Dark Ages. Having been used to UK and European railways it was a real shock to see trains plodding along with seemingly no urgency or purpose, stopping at every chicken coop or bush along the way.
Not only that but there seemed to be an awful waste of motive power with numerous locos on each train. Today, many trains still plod along, seemingly nothing has been done to speed things up to compete with the efficient road hauliers.
Purchasing large numbers of new locomotives won't do much unless the services are speeded up and made customer friendly, and that applies to freight and passenger. The customer is not interested in what sort of all singing, all dancing loco is doing the job, rather how long it takes and can these timings be relied upon. Running freights at 90kmph doesn't cut the mustard any longer, we all know that road transport travels a lot faster than this and produces a quicker door to door service for most commodities.
The emphasis should be on improving the infrastructure to enable trains to run faster and more reliably, but unless the theft of cables, rails, sleepers, fishplates and various bearings and other rolling stock components is stopped rail has very little future in my eyes.
Pierre wrote:“It's always interesting to get another perspective on the SAR but the railway you and... others remember is not the SAR I remember and I guess we don't share the same longing for it.â€
The above quote is worth replying to. For many on the List what you say is true and to be honest this has been true for me too at times, even when the railways were still king. What we write about most of the time are good memories. There were lots of those, but believe me, there were some awful ones too. Drawing up at a siding in the Karoo at midday in 40 degree heat right next to a goods train loaded with cattle bones in open trucks, the meat of which stank putridly and I can go on and on. But most of the time, the passenger journeys were great experiences considering all the factors that had to work together to make this possible. Unfortunately, by the ‘80’s things had started to unravel and for some time too. It was in about the mid 70’s that my wife and our children took the PE train from Pretoria to visit her parents who lived in the Wilderness. At that time already, she said, “Never again!†And 10 years later, on a very hot and uncomfortable round trip with a Railway Society crowd, squashed into one compartment where coaches were empty (my boet and I changed later into another compartment without “permission†from the ticket examiner) I said, never again!†I know that for many, train travel back then continued to be pleasant, especially on the many specials that ran for steam so my own experience wasn’t by any means everyone’s but that’s when it ended for me from a travelling perspective on standard Spoornet trains.
For the rest, I found your points excellent and no matter how much we may like to think that our branch lines are going to live again, your argument is unassailable.
