South Africa’s gleaming trains that exist only on Powerpoints and press conferences, feasibility studies
IDO LEKOTA
There are trips that test one’s patience, trips that test one’s wallet, and then there are trips that test the structural integrity of one’s spine — the kind that leave your lower back filing a formal grievance somewhere around the Bela-Bela toll gate. Our (my wife’s and mine) recent pilgrimage to Polokwane for a funeral was the latter.
By the time we limped back into Johannesburg — after petrol, tolls, and the carefully rationed padkos that accompanies any respectable South African road journey — I had spent just under R3000. That figure, dear reader, does not include the more expensive line item: my body, now billing me in instalments of lumbar pain.
There comes a time when the body stops treating long journeys as routine and starts treating them as hostage negotiations. The road that once felt like a simple passage now announces itself loudly in the back, the knees, the shoulders, and the stiff, martyred patience required to keep going. One begins to measure distance not in kilometres but in comfort, recovery time, and the hard-won wisdom of knowing that endurance — like data, like patience, like the Gauteng e-toll system — has its limits. What used to be a casual drive now feels like a small act of courage, performed in quiet, grunting conversation with one’s own creaking flesh.
And yet, like every journey back to the province, this one didn’t just consume fuel. It ignited memory — and, briefly, my temper, somewhere around the third unmarked speed bump.
Chookoo Days
I found myself thinking, as one does at 140km/h with a full bladder and a half-formed grudge, about the trips I used to make in my younger days to Lebowakgomo, that township some 40km south-east of Polokwane, to visit my parents while they were still alive. Those were different journeys entirely — and some of them, if memory serves and nostalgia doesn’t lie too much, were made by train.
The old chookoo-chookoo, rattling through rural stations with the unhurried confidence of something that had absolutely nowhere better to be. It didn’t rush. It wheezed, it groaned, it stopped at platforms that were really just a bench and a rumour, and somehow it still got you there with your dignity mostly intact. There was romance in that inefficiency. Try finding romance in a Toyota Quantum overtaking on a blind rise.
In those days, the road — and the rail — did not feel like an ordeal. It felt like return. It felt like duty, yes, but also like belonging. One travelled not with resignation, but with purpose, and occasionally with a chicken in a plastic bag, because that was simply how things were done.
The Small Passenger
My daughter, then under the age of ten, used to accompany me happily on those trips, treating the whole affair as an adventure of Amazing Race proportions. There were cousins to meet, yards to explore, games to invent, and the blessed, unsupervised freedom of a township where a child could gambol about without needing a calendar appointment or a security clearance. For a single-child family, such visits weren’t just trips — they were oxygen. They gave her siblings-by-kinship, if not by birth, and gave me the quiet satisfaction of watching her joy expand well beyond the boundary walls of Johannesburg.
Then came the teenage years — that great continental shift in family logistics — when the same daughter who once travelled eagerly beside me developed a transport policy so sophisticated it deserved its own white paper. She was not, under any circumstances, coming along anymore. The reason, delivered with the brutal, unblinking honesty only teenagers can weaponise, was that “that place is too far and too hot.”
Too far and too hot. Four words. A devastatingly concise transport feasibility study, peer-reviewed by nobody, disputed by no one, and more efficient than most actual government feasibility studies I have since had the misfortune of reading.
Enter Panyaza, Stage Left, With a Blueprint
My recent post-Polokwane musings — somewhere between the second toll gate and the third packet of biltong — led me to Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi’s proposal for a high-speed train linking Johannesburg and Polokwane. I could not help but mull it over, the way one mulls over a lottery ticket: with equal parts hope and hard-earned cynicism.
On the surface, the idea has all the familiar charms of a grand public dream — speed, convenience, regional connection, and the promise of economic revival strung along the route like fairy lights. In a country that often announces infrastructure with the enthusiasm of a wedding toast and the delivery record of a permanently postponed lecture, such visions are always, treacherously, tempting.
But let us be clear, and let us say it with the weary authority of people who have heard this song before, in several keys, from several administrations: this piece is far from supporting Lesufi’s dream project. South Africans have lived through too many heroic announcements that ended up somewhere between feasibility study and fantasy brochure — glossy renders of gleaming trains that exist, so far, only in PowerPoint and press conference. We have learned, the hard way, that shiny transport dreams can arrive with microphones long before they arrive with tracks. We are, as a nation, world champions of the ribbon-cutting ceremony for infrastructure that has not yet been built.
We’ve Been Here Before, Sort Of
And here is where it gets deliciously ironic, because we’ve actually done this before — sort of, partially, expensively. The Gautrain glides between Joburg and Pretoria like it’s got somewhere important to be and knows it, a genuine monument to the idea that South Africans can, when properly bribed with Reserve Bank money and World Cup deadlines, build something that actually runs on time. It is, without irony, magnificent — sleek, punctual, air-conditioned, everything the N1 to Polokwane is not.
And just when we’d settled comfortably into our Gautrain seats, feeling faintly smug about our first-world fifteen minutes, President Cyril Ramaphosa reached into the archive of grand South African promises and pulled out the Blue Train — not the storied, opulent one that already exists for those with deep pockets and deeper patience, but a new pledge, a fresh vision, dangled somewhere between a State of the Nation Address and a press release. For now it remains what most South African mega-projects remain in their infancy: a pipe dream with excellent branding.
So the ledger reads thus: one high-speed rail success story (Gautrain, limited route, premium price), one Blue Train promise (still parked, metaphorically, at the station of good intentions), and now one Lesufi proposal for Johannesburg-to-Polokwane, currently residing in the same folder as every other visionary transport plan this province has produced since roughly the dawn of PowerPoint.
Three Fronts of a Fantasy
Because if we’re going to dream, and dreaming is free even when tickets aren’t, let’s dream properly. Let’s imagine the bullet train doesn’t stop timidly at Polokwane but keeps going — Musina to Cape Town, Johannesburg to Durban, a silver spine running the length of the country, stitching Limpopo to the Karoo to the coast. What would it actually change? I’d argue on three fronts: the people who ride it, the innovation that carries it, and the sheer, unreasonable entertainment of the thing.
People
Start with the business traveller, that harried creature currently choosing between a 5am flight and a six-hour drive with a laptop balanced on their knees at every garage stop. Give her a bullet train and she boards at Park Station with a coffee, opens her laptop, and arrives in Durban having already answered her emails and mentally rehearsed the pitch — no security queue interrogating her belt, no turbulence, no R450 airport parking. The train doesn’t just move her body; it gives her back the hours currently sacrificed to travel logistics.
Then there’s the leisure traveller — my daughter, essentially, and every teenager like her who has ever vetoed a family trip on the grounds of distance and temperature. A three-hour Johannesburg-to-Cape Town run reframes the whole negotiation. “Too far” stops being a valid objection when “far” has been redefined downward by several hundred kilometres. Weekend trips to see grandparents, spontaneous beach runs, last-minute funerals attended without the two-day round-trip toll on the spine — the train doesn’t just move people, it changes what people consider reasonable to attempt on a Friday afternoon.
And then, quietly but significantly, there’s everyone currently excluded from easy mobility altogether — the elderly relative who can no longer manage a 12-hour drive, the student without a car, the family for whom flights are simply not in the budget but a well-priced train ticket might be. A genuine high-speed network doesn’t just serve the people who already have options. Done right, it multiplies who gets to have options in the first place.
Innovation
Here is where I get to indulge the engineer-in-training that lives in every South African who has ever complained about load-shedding while secretly wanting to fix it themselves. A bullet train worth the name would need to solve, in one project, several problems we currently solve badly one at a time. Power: imagine a rail corridor lined with solar arrays and wind turbines, generating enough to run the trains and feed the surrounding towns — infrastructure that doesn’t just move people but powers the very communities it passes through. Route: imagine stations not as glorified bus shelters but as innovation hubs, the way Gautrain stations have quietly become anchors for surrounding development, except this time deliberately, with incubators and logistics hubs bolted onto the platforms from day one.
Ticketing and boarding, done properly, could leapfrog decades of queue-culture entirely — biometric boarding, dynamic pricing that rewards off-peak travel, real-time tracking that tells you, correctly, when the train will arrive, a genuinely novel experience for anyone who has waited for a South African bus. And because we are, whether we admit it or not, a nation of engineers and tinkerers, there is no reason the manufacturing and maintenance of such a system couldn’t be built locally rather than imported wholesale — skills transfer, local jobs, a rail industry instead of a rail import bill. It’s ambitious. It’s also, unlike some ambitions, actually buildable, provided the will outlasts the launch event.
Entertainment
And then, because I refuse to imagine infrastructure without also imagining fun, there is the sheer entertainment value of the journey itself. Picture an observation carriage somewhere between the Karoo and the Cape winelands, glass-roofed, watching the landscape do what it does best — turn from bushveld to grassland to mountain to ocean in the space of a few hours, no petrol stop required to appreciate any of it. Picture onboard entertainment that doesn’t involve fighting your seatmate for the armrest: streaming, gaming, a dining car serving something better than a garage pie, perhaps even — let us dream extravagantly — a carriage dedicated entirely to the kind of live music South Africans produce better than almost anyone.
Picture the tourism version of this: international visitors doing the Musina-to-Cape-Town run not as a grim logistical necessity but as a bucket-list journey, the way people ride the Rovos Rail or the Blue Train today, except accessible to more than the deep-pocketed few. A joyride, genuinely, rather than an endurance test — the kind of trip you’d choose to take even if you didn’t have to, which is, when you think about it, the highest compliment any form of transport can receive.
The Fantasy, Indulged Briefly
That said — and I say this the way one admits to still believing, just a little, in birthday wishes — it is difficult not to imagine the possibilities. No petrol calculations performed on the dashboard like some kind of roadside abacus. No toll gates extracting their tribute every ninety kilometres. No roadside negotiations with snacks, bladders, and the eternal question of whether the next stop has a decent bathroom. No arriving already exhausted before the actual funeral, wedding, or family reunion has even begun. No strategic pretending, mile after punishing mile, that “it’s not that bad” when everyone in the car knows, with total certainty, that it is. And, crucially — crucially — no need to mount a full diplomatic campaign to convince a teenage passenger that she should come along, when she has already issued a formal, notarised rejection of the route’s geography and climate.
A fast train could, in theory, restore the dignity of the journey. It could turn Polokwane from a place reached by endurance into a place reached by choice — the way the Gautrain turned Sandton into a place you pop over to, rather than a place you brace for. For those of us who still have one foot in Johannesburg and the other in the province many call the Eden of Africa, such a train would be more than infrastructure. It would be a reconciliation project on rails.
Reality, Meanwhile, Waits at the Platform
But theory is where politicians so often leave us, waving cheerfully from a stage, ribbon and scissors in hand. Reality is where commuters live — in the queue, in the traffic, in the third hour of a drive that a train could do in one.
So yes, perhaps Panyaza’s fast train may one day become the answer to my predicament. Or at least it may become the answer to the increasingly common South African condition of loving two places dearly while no longer enjoying, even slightly, the road between them. Until then, we remain suspended exactly where we have always been: between ancestral duty and transport fatigue, between nostalgia and toll fees, between the chookoo-chookoo of memory and the Gautrain of the present, between the Blue Train’s still-unrealised promise and the practical doubt of a man who has filled up his tank one too many times.
If the train ever comes — the real one, the Johannesburg–Polokwane one, tracks and all — I may take it. I may even weep a little at the platform, from relief as much as nostalgia. But I will board with the memory of a thousand promises, and with the healthy suspicion of a man who has learned, the expensive way, that not every grand idea is a train. Some, dressed up in launch events and glossy brochures, are merely a station — beautifully tiled, extensively photographed, and going absolutely nowhere.