SOLUTIONS FOR RAIL OPERATORS
The stark realities of train travel in South Africa
From the evergreen Drakensberg to the rolling hills of the Eastern Cape and the sparse hinterland of the Karoo, the beauty of SA captures tourists like a piece of Thabo Mbeki prose. There is one thing that can’t be escaped in travels around the nation: the gut-wrenching, uncomfortable poverty. If you travel by air, looking at the poverty from the small window of a plane might almost be an academic exercise. But apartheid’s spatial planning cannot be disguised. The size and scale of townships and informal settlements are a stark reminder of how divided we are. When taking to the road, poverty is never more than a few metres away, whether it is the face peering at you from the back of a bakkie or the lonely souls walking from one part of nowhere to any part of anywhere. There is a constant appeal to us passing in air-conditioned comfort to take them with, to take them to a better place. A train journey across SA is a brutal assault on a padkos-fattened consciousness. Taking the Prasa-...
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