In search of a story

One of the joys of journalism

One of the joys of journalism is going in search of a story only to find a bigger one when you start reporting from the field I am in South Africa to write a book about the Cape to Cairo raillway.

This was the project conceived by Cecil Rhodes, the founder of the de Beers diamond company who wanted to build a line all the way through Africa in order to establish British dominance oover the whole continent. I say ‘project’ because, of course, it never happened. No one ever went to Cape Town station and bought a single to Cairo. But by the 1920s, as construction continued after Rhodes’s premature death in 1902 at the age of 48 intrepid travellers could actually travel by rail through South Africa, and what is now Botswana and Zimbabwe to Victoria Falls. Then changing trains they could reach Bukama in the Congo.

So the idea was for me - along with my friend Liam - to travel on as much of the route as I could, but taking buses or hire cars where the railway was no longer running. Because eastern Congo, now the inaptly named Democratic Republic of Congo, is reckoned too dangerous for tourists, we will be taking an alternative route as there is another railway, built by the Chinese in the 1970s that goes all the way from just north of Lusaka in Zambia up to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. Amazingly, that seems to run as a passenger service once per week, so that became our target for the second half of the trip, which means reaching the starting point at Kapiri Mpocha on a Mon evening. I will be writing about that three day trip in my next column if it all goes to plan - and perhaps even if it does not.

Back to Cape Town. The Man at Seat 61 reckoned there was a train every week to Johannesburg leaving on a sunday. We had timed our arrival accordingly but as we started making enquiries beforehand, we found no evidence of the service’s existence. And so it proved. There are no long distance trans out of Cape Town. Indeed, there seem to be none in South Africa at all. The departure board for long distance services in the bustling Cape Town station was blank. The bustle was all local commuters The information desk told us all long distance trains had been cancelled at the time of the Covid pandemic and none have restarted.

The obvious question, which I kept on asking was why. So the quest for Rhodes’s railway became a rather more pertinent and cotemporary question. How come a country which once boasted the world’s tenth largest rail network and had a remarkable set of world class services running between all its major cities has simply abandoned the whole enterprise, with Covid given as the reason. There was talk, too of cable theft and other technical issues.

So the furthest we could get on the railway heading north was to Wellington, a mere 30 miles out of Cape Town and some 6,320 miles short of Cairo -sending Rhodes spinning in his grave. This was, in fact, the first line completed in the Cape and opened in 1863 and is now served by Metrorail, Cape Town’s busy suburban network - see separate piece - but that is far as regular passenger trains currently reach.

The long distance services were stopped as soon as the pandemic begun, but why have they not been restored? This is where the real story begins especially because the mystery of the absent trains is heightened by the fat that two luxury train services operate trains from Cape Town to Pretoria, and one of them, Rovos, runs a wide variety of trips. The, other, the Blue Train has a long pedigree stretching back to 1960`and is actually still run by Transnet a hived off section of the state railway company.

Even more strangely, thee services were mentioned by every railworker we talked to on our journey north up to Pretoria as evidence that there was nothing wrong with the network. We even saw a few goods trains thnderuing past too, powered by electric locomotives and therefore belying the point that cable theft was at the root of the problem. If luxury trains and goods services can run, why can’t public ones restart. Covid was five years ago and surely there was time to ensure the trains were available again. As we travelled up along the route and dropped in on a succession of abandoned stations, talking to various always friendly rail staff - with one exception, a manager who lied to me about the fact that the line was not functioning south of Worcester,who were all angry about the lack of trains.

Their explanations went far beyond Covid which they thought was an excuse. One thread was that the root of the problem was that the railways had been fragmented into various companies, rather like in the UK, and although remained in the public sector, managers were able to take advantage of the devolved system to let contracts to private entities invariably run by friends or relatives.

Jimmy, at Worcester, who like all these rail workers had time on his hands to talk to us, reckoned that there were rail managers who had interests in the bus services running as alternatives to the railways and consequently they blocked any return of trains. Others spoke in a similar vein. Corruption and the fragmentation of the system, which meant that there was far less oversight of the way it was being run, was a consistent theme.

The effect, though, has been catastrophic. The stations are in various states of disrepair although some the security and rail staff valiantly try to keep them ready for use. At Worcester for example, a prosperous looking town which used to be commuter land for Cape Town, the staff grew vegetables in the planters and polished the floors of the toilet and waiting room so well that they glistened with a shine that would have graced the Savoy hotel. Elsewhere /at De Aar huge palm trees that once towered above the trains, remain somewhat neglected among a sea of weeds. Indeed, unwanted greenery was the dominant feature at every station, though at Kimberley an army guys in orange jump suits and armed with strimmers were busy trying to clean up the traps to greet the arrival of the Blue Train, a Sisyphian task given the preponderance of plants that had invaded the tracks

While the visual effect was all too apparent, the economic impact of the lost railway was the man concern of the railworkers. De Aar, once a junction of four lines and an enormous goods yard now all but derelict. .John, whom we met there, spoke of the decline of the town and there was clear testimony outside the abandoned station where shops that clearly had once sold luxury goods were in a dishevelled state. John, like all the railworkers, was angry, bemoaning the state of the once prosperous town which now boasted a KFC and little else. Oddly at the station there was a woman sitting behind the ticket counter...with no tickets to sell. It was a fitting illustration of the insane situation of South African railways.

Lots of these workers are hopeful that one day the trains will return but it is difficult to be optimistic. Covid was, in fact, the last straw. The trains have been in decline since 2016 with train frequencies reduced and routes cut back. Of course these long distance trains would probably not pay for themselves given the huge distances involved, but they provided a vital link for all these small towwns which are now served by infrequent bus services and flights between the main ones. In Mafeking, we met Martha serving us in a restaurant who told us how she had to endure an 18 hour bus ride to Cape Town because there were no trains and she was promoting the local marathon to runners in the Two Oceans event. There must be thousands like her.

There is a tragic irony that in a country where equality was supposed to be the watchword after Apartheid, the government has created a situation where there are only luxury trains for long distance rail passengers and none for ordinary people.

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A chink of light

Amidst all this deeply depressing story of a railway that seems lost to the world, there was at least a bit of light with the resurgence of commuter rail in Cape Town. We had been told that the trains and the station were too dangerous to use but we ventured to there anyway given it was the starting point of the Cape too Cairo railway - well not quite as the station has moved a couple of times.

It was as mentioned bustling and while there were a few undesirables hanging around, that is hardly surprising in a country of inequalities like South Africa. Generally the atmosphere was not that different to the Gare du Nord and, most important, the trains were modern. We had been advised to buy first class tickets to get to Muizenberg, which is the little seaside village where Rhodes had a cottage in which he died and is now a museum. However, there was no first class because it was a through train with no separate carriages. Moreover there were plenty of security guys in hi vis on the train and consequently the service had become much safer.

We had a long chat with a white middle aged woman Shirley Erasmus, who had started taking the train when her car was in the garage and now commutes on it daily: ‘They now check tickets before people get on and that has helped with security. And the new through carriages are great’. She is now a convert, especially as the parallel road on this Southern Line along the coast is a permanent traffic jam.