It is early 2010. We are standing on one of Joburg’s yellow mine dumps, looking south. In the middle distance is the magnificent FNB Stadium that will host the Fifa World Cup final. In the foreground is an elegantly arched concrete bridge carrying the shining rails, masts and overhead cables of the revamped 14km rail link between central Joburg and Nasrec. After 18 months of construction at a cost of R70m (2025 value: R140m), the new line is ready to ferry more than 20,000 passengers in peak hour.
Nasrec was one of 50 stations refurbished by the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) for the World Cup. After the competition, said then deputy transport minister Jeremy Cronin, the station would serve the stadium but also enable citizens of nearby Soweto, deliberately placed far from the CBD during apartheid, to be quickly linked to economic hubs. “As we’re launching this, we’re transforming the very geography of South Africa. We’re actually democratising space.”
Move on 10 years to January 2020. The Nasrec station itself has closed. The steel of the rails is rusted; the overhead electrical equipment has vanished, apart from a few lengths of cable drooping uselessly from the masts; and the pillars of the concrete bridge are covered with graffiti and piled with litter.
The broken and deserted Nasrec rail link is an emblem of what happened to the South African railway network — once regarded as one of the world’s best. Its destruction had little to do with the lockdown, though the government at times pretended Covid was the cause.
In January 2020, before the lockdown was thought of, Prasa announced it was experiencing “unprecedented levels of vandalism and theft across all the regional Metrorail (commuter) and Shosholoza Meyl (intercity) services, resulting in massive disruption to commuter services, with vast sections being closed down”.
Zwelakhe Mayaba, acting Prasa CEO at the time, said: “The [extent] of the task to rebuild substations and related support infrastructure cannot be underestimated; there simply are no quick fixes. Vast amounts of money have been spent on repair — only to have thieves return, armed to the teeth in most cases, to harvest our infrastructure.”
A year later, in January 2021, the passenger rail network was no longer on its knees: it was out for the count. Thanks to corruption, management instability and astonishing incompetence (the entire Prasa board had been fired by then transport minister Fikile Mbalula in December 2019), no rail security guards were in place at all for several months during the lockdown in 2020. The thieves moved in. In September 2020, more than 6km of cables were stolen in just 24 hours.
The broken and deserted Nasrec rail link is an emblem of what happened to the South African railway network — once regarded as one of the world’s best
The International Rail Journal reported that “hundreds of kilometres of overhead cables, signalling wires and catenary masts have been stolen, affecting every Metrorail route in Gauteng. Stations have also been destroyed, with buildings reduced to rubble and platforms torn up by thieves looking for signal wiring.”
It said that on the once busy 35km main line between Joburg and the West Rand mining town of Randfontein, “around 60km of cable was stolen during the lockdown alone. No commuter trains are running on this line, while the handful of Transnet-operated freight trains still running are often caught in cables left dangling by the thieves.”
Annual commuter train trips had already fallen from 634-million in 2010 to 208-million at the end of 2019. The lockdown simply provoked a dramatic acceleration of a decades-long downward trend. In 2020 commuter services ceased completely, for the first time in South Africa’s 160 years of rail history.
To understand the collapse, we need to go back to April 1990. After 80 years of direct government and parliamentary control of the railways, South African Transport Services (SATS), formerly South African Railways & Harbours (SAR&H), became a limited liability company under the name of Transnet Ltd.
This seemed to make strategic sense. The National Party administrations of PW Botha and FW de Klerk were in favour of privatisation of major state-owned entities, an approach that was broadly adopted by the first ANC administration under Nelson Mandela. The formation of Transnet was seen as a first step. But the push to privatisation in the 1990s was later abandoned by the ANC under president Thabo Mbeki.
Meanwhile, the main change from the old SATS structure was that all suburban train services now fell under a new South African Rail Commuter Corp (SARCC), reporting to the department of transport. The idea was that SARCC would commercialise the land and property assets around commuter stations, with the ultimate aim of reducing subsidisation of services. Later the SARCC was renamed Prasa, with long-distance passenger trains added to its responsibility, and the goods operation was placed under Transnet Freight Rail (TFR). This evidently made sense to the consultants with their focus on “core businesses”, but it ignored the complex integration on which the old South African Railways was founded.
This seemed to make strategic sense. The National Party administrations of PW Botha and FW de Klerk were in favour of privatisation of major state-owned entities, an approach that was broadly adopted by the first ANC administration under Nelson Mandela. The formation of Transnet was seen as a first step. But the push to privatisation in the 1990s was later abandoned by the ANC under president Thabo Mbeki.
Meanwhile, the main change from the old SATS structure was that all suburban train services now fell under a new South African Rail Commuter Corp (SARCC), reporting to the department of transport. The idea was that SARCC would commercialise the land and property assets around commuter stations, with the ultimate aim of reducing subsidisation of services. Later the SARCC was renamed Prasa, with long-distance passenger trains added to its responsibility, and the goods operation was placed under Transnet Freight Rail (TFR). This evidently made sense to the consultants with their focus on “core businesses”, but it ignored the complex integration on which the old South African Railways was founded.
In the 1980s the security resources of the state were increasingly stretched by the “border war” in Namibia and Angola and the 1980s state of emergency. In this context the railways were not seen as vulnerable. So the 16,500 members of the railways police were amalgamated with the SAP in October 1986.
As Johan Burger of the Institute for Security Studies has written, this integration “was accompanied by undertakings that with an enlarged SAP, more attention would be given to the rail industry, its property, staff and commuters. Over the next few years quite the opposite happened, and the situation deteriorated to the extent that the rail industry had to employ private security companies.” The specialised services and expertise of the railways police were lost or ignored. SATS now not only had no responsibility for its own security, but no control over the agency supposed to provide it.
As for the SAP itself, a University of Pretoria researcher, J van der Mescht, has written that it “had a weird mandate and various roles, as its focus was to sustain the apartheid machinery. The consequences of the decision to disband the railways police were to have a hugely devastating effect on the rail commuters who were mainly black working-class and poor citizens. Criminals from various notorious urban hotspots migrated to the rail environment; political violence also discovered a habitat in the rail commuter environment.”
More than 95% of the national infrastructure was damaged in 2020 by theft and vandalism
Moving commuter trains became terrifying battlefields in the 1980s civil war between Inkatha and the ANC, as well as soft targets for routine criminality. Under apartheid, the crowded trains serving the black townships had never been safe; moving into the 1990s and 2000s, there was not even a semblance of security on trains or at stations. The Rail Safety Regulator reported routinely that trains and stations were seriously unsafe.
This was the formidably negative legacy confronted by Hishaam Emeran, who became CEO of Prasa when yet another new board was appointed in November 2023. A Prasa veteran of 17 years’ experience, he has brought a new sense of purpose to the organisation, along with a realistic assessment of how long it will take to restore passenger services.
It was a great mistake to separate goods trains from passenger traffic, which mostly used the same tracks. This created major operational, safety and accountability problems that did not exist before. Transnet still owns much of the rail network over which Prasa operates. TFR naturally had no interest in passenger trains, which went from enjoying priority in the old structure to being supplicants, at the mercy of freight timetabling and having to beg to use locomotives. In addition, the new structure created additional and expensive hierarchies of boards and managers.
To make matters worse, Prasa reported to the minister of transport, who is responsible for national transport policy, but Transnet fell under the department of public enterprises. This created obvious and enduring problems of accountability, bureaucracy, regulation and enforcement.
Against this backdrop of operational, managerial and financial decline, the railways became steadily more unsafe. This was a 35-year deterioration that culminated in the widespread theft, brigandage and sabotage of the 2020 lockdown.
To understand this in turn, we need to go back to the 1980s, when an effective railway policing system was simply abolished — in retrospect, an astonishing decision, but one that explains a great deal of what has gone wrong.
The SAR&H Police was established by the department of transport in July 1934. Its military-style training and rank structure mirrored that of the South African Police (SAP). The railways police had their own charge offices and a detective arm. In their distinctive green uniforms, the job of the railways police was to patrol trains, stations and goods yards. Constables on duty at railway stations attracted the unkind nickname of blompotte (flower pots), but they provided a constant and visible deterrent to petty and major crime.
The network that carried Prasa trains consisted of 40 lines in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, greater Cape Town and the Eastern Cape metros of Gqeberha and East London. More than 95% of the national infrastructure was damaged in 2020 by theft and vandalism.
By June 2024, Emeran was able to report that 31 of Prasa’s 40 corridors were operational, with passenger journeys rising to 40-million in the 2023/2024 financial year, up from 15-million in the previous period. This was a far cry indeed from the 500-million-plus journeys of a decade before, but it was a start.
Emeran’s key insight was to fix the aspects that his predecessors had failed to address — passenger safety on trains and at stations, on the platforms as well as in the vicinity, and securing physical assets. Alongside this focus was an incremental approach to restoring the infrastructure, rather than attempting to reopen entire corridors.
For example, the line linking the old west Witwatersrand gold mining towns was reclaimed in stages — first between Joburg’s Park Station and Florida (March 2024), followed by the next stage to Roodepoort (May 2024) and then intended to reach Randfontein in 2025.
Some of the lines serving the south of Joburg and Soweto (New Canada-George Goch, Crown-Westgate, Riverlea-Nasrec and Booysens-Faraday) are projected to be restored only by 2027 or later. At the moment these stations are all still unusable and derelict.
Rail infrastructure is complex. On-track assets include rails, turnouts (points), lubricators, sleepers, fasteners and ballast. Off-track assets include service roads, fencing and level crossings, along with structures including bridges, platforms, drainage gutters, culverts and cuttings in the earth to allow passage of a level track. Any of these elements, if missing or neglected, can make it impossible to run trains safely — or run them at all.
Because most of the Prasa network was designed to be electrified more than a century ago, the other crucial component of infrastructure is the overhead electrical traction equipment, known as OHTE. This was almost totally destroyed by thieves because of the demand for copper in the wiring. On the principle that it takes one weak link to break a chain, if just a few metres of OHTE is missing, that can cripple an entire route.
By 2023/2024 nearly 1,000km of OHTE had been replaced and restored.
Even with recovery in all these areas, an efficient service cannot be run if there is no electronic signalling to control train movements. Signal wiring was also pillaged by thieves. As Emeran says: “Restoring signalling systems across the country is crucial to achieving high-frequency rail services and attracting more passengers, and is a key focus area for Prasa.”
The bad news for the criminal syndicates is that, thanks to new technology, “the copper in the OHTE has been replaced in the new equipment with steel and aluminium,” says Emeran, “constituting a 90% reduction in copper content and so largely removing the incentive for theft”.
Prasa in 2024 classified a total of 31 of its 40 lines as “recovered”, at a cost of about R5bn. However, when it says a service is “resumed”, that simply means a train can travel in full (whole line) or sectionally (portion of a line). Trains are running infrequently, at 30-minute to one-hour intervals, depending on the time of day.
That contrasts with the 20th-century scale of traffic, when Park Station would be dispatching and receiving dozens of trains in every peak-hour period. Such frequency depends entirely on efficient signalling, whereas at present trains are authorised manually and by written and verbal orders. This is time-consuming as well as a risk to safe operation.
Emeran and his team have made a good start. It is reassuring that rolling stock is now available for when more trains can be run. “For the financial year under review,” notes the 2023/2024 annual report, “the number of correctly configured operationally ready train sets, including the old and new EMU fleet, was 239. At year-end, 71 of these were from the old fleet and 168 from the new EMU fleet.” (See box).
The thorny legacy issue of sharing some tracks with Transnet persists. The big change that favours the new Prasa regime under Emeran is that both organisations now report to the minister of transport. This should reduce tensions and artificial competition between Prasa and Transnet.
Prasa’s impressive progress in restoring commuter rail off a low base has unfortunately not been emulated in its long-distance operation Shosholoza Meyl, also known as main-line passenger services (MLPS).
There is no question that long-distance rail travel is part of Prasa’s job. It is mandated by the National Land Transport Transition Act of 2000 to “provide for long-haul passenger rail within, to and from the Republic of South Africa”.
It remains to be seen if Prasa and Transnet, now reporting to the same ministry, can be induced to co-operate to rescue main-line passenger rail travel
However, MLPS remains in the collapsed state it fell into in 2020. Prasa has had to beg Transnet for the use of locomotives, and the national intercity routes are owned by Transnet. Many lines are still in bad repair and locomotives are often unavailable or unreliable.
The servicing capacity required for long-distance rail travel has long since disappeared, along with the institutional knowledge and systems that supported efficient ticketing, bedding and catering services. Stations along the routes are, without exception, derelict.
Attempts have been made by Prasa to restore a basic service on some routes. At the end of 2023 MLPS advertised trains for the holiday period between Joburg and East London, and later between Joburg and Durban as well as to Musina. The result was an embarrassing disaster. Locomotives broke down, trains ran out of food and water, and eventually passengers had to be rescued and transported to their destination by bus.
It emerged unofficially that these attempts were made at the insistence of transport minister Mbalula, despite the protests by Prasa officials that the organisation was not ready and that Transnet could not support them.
While the construction and maintenance of Prasa’s new rolling stock is being supported by a dedicated factory (see box), it has no such facility for MLPS. The last main-line coaches were built in 1980 and many have been standing decaying in the yards for years. It remains to be seen if Prasa and Transnet, now reporting to the same ministry, can be induced to co-operate to rescue main-line passenger rail travel.
Meanwhile, the 2023/2024 Prasa annual report claims that MLPS prioritises the Joburg-East London line based on available resources. “This plan relies on a projection of 34 annual train trips. The services will have a flexible interchangeable plan that will allow extension to other routes, such as Musina, Durban and Cape Town.”
It is a sad commentary on a railway that once had dozens of passenger trains running on any given day throughout the country. From the 1930s to the 1980s, the long-distance timetables listed more than 3,000 stations and halts. It was possible to buy a ticket to travel from any one of these to any other. Trains between the major cities were frequent and generally reliable.
Deregulation of road transport began to drain traffic from rail, but as late as 2004/2005, MLPS still operated on 15 routes, with a total of 6,500 journeys annually and 3-million passenger journeys. The routes included connections to Cape Town, East London, Durban, Pretoria and even Maputo in Mozambique.
Indications are that new minister Barbara Creecy is aware of the historic problems bedevilling the relationship between Prasa and Transnet. However, it seems that lessons have not been learnt.
Last month, another attempt was made to run a train on the 600km route from Joburg to Durban. A GroundUp journalist reported that “the train broke down numerous times”. The longest delay in one place was eight hours. Some passengers “left the train in search of alternative transport. Those of us who opted to wait on the train were eventually taken by bus to Durban.”
The train departed on February 27 at 6pm from Joburg Park Station and was scheduled to arrive the following night at 8.30pm in Durban. That trip would have been 26 hours in duration if it had been completed, against the standard 14-hour journey of the Trans-Natal in the last century (and 26 hours from Joburg to Cape Town, more than twice the distance to Durban).
Prasa confirmed that the train was affected by cable theft at Newcastle, followed by a locomotive failure at Ladysmith. “Inspections of the line are conducted regularly, but given the unpredictable nature of cable theft, it does mean that unexpected service disruptions can still occur.”
The new Prasa management have made some impressive gains in a year, but in governance terms they had some catching up to do to compensate for the way things were run before. They were in charge for only three months of the 2023/2024 financial year, and so the auditor-general’s (AG’s) report for that period cannot be blamed on them.
Signed in September 2024, the AG report found that Prasa’s financial statements “were not prepared in accordance with the prescribed financial reporting framework and supported by full and proper records ... uncorrected material misstatements and supporting records that could not be provided resulted in the financial statements receiving a qualified opinion.
“Effective and appropriate steps were not taken to prevent irregular expenditure”, most of which was caused by “noncompliance with laws and regulations pertaining to procurement and contract management. Effective steps were not taken to prevent fruitless and wasteful expenditure.
“I have concluded that the particulars of irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure balances are materially misstated due to Prasa not having revisited the irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure incurred in financial years prior to March 31 2021.”
Officials were “not effectively deterred from committing transgressions”.
That is in the past, and observers will be looking forward eagerly to the AG’s annual report for the 2024/2025 period.
Meanwhile, Prasa seems to be on track to restore commuter rail services in major urban areas. There is no doubt about the demand: rail is cheaper, safer and more environmentally friendly than road. Governance structures are now appropriate and minister Creecy has a reputation for firm but empathetic management.
Judging by the evidence on the ground, as Emeran and his team literally rebuild the railway brick by brick, rail by rail and wire by wire, we should see a largely restored network within five years. It might just be the first recovery success story for state-owned entities, after the ruinous decade of state capture.
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