Getting back on the Cape track

A train every 10 minutes with an average waiting time of five minutes. These are the ambitious plans of Western Cape railroad boss Raymond Maseko for routes plagued by delays.

Maseko is the provincial regional manager of the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa), which last week tested Cape Town’s central line from the city to Chris Hani station in Khayelitsha.

He says the testing ensures that the line is safe and efficient, but it will become operational only when it’s approved by the railway safety regulator.

Part of this involved persuading people who had built shacks dangerously close to the line in Langa to move to safer distances. About 1,000 shacks had prevented trains from running.

The line closed in November 2019 because of cable theft and vandalism, depriving commuters from access to cheaper transport.

Maseko was appointed permanently in February, after being acting boss since 2020. He has worked at Prasa for about 20 years. He grew up and worked in Benoni on the East Rand, moving to the Western Cape in 2008.

“We had a serious problem,” he says. “From 2015 to 2019, Prasa lost 80% of its value.” Then trains stopped completely during Covid. When service resumed, only seven out of 124 stations were operational, Maseko tells the FM. By September 2020, this had been increased to 30.

During repair of the line between Bonteheuwel and Langa, two Prasa workers were shot and are now paralysed. Maseko says it was Prasa’s “first hard interface” with extortionists. “We needed to change our security plan.”

The city offered a R5,000 reward for information leading to arrests and Prasa co-operated with law enforcement, returning to work in bulletproof vehicles with armed guards.

“Most of the people said: ‘You guys are useless. You will never recover the central line,’” he says, but adds that the community worked with Prasa in clearing shacks from the tracks “so that we are able to run a train”.

However, when it reached the Nyanga section of the line beyond Langa, Prasa couldn’t proceed. More shacks had been built on the track between Nyanga and Philippi. “We are talking about 5,000 structures. You could not see the track, it was completely gone.”

Maseko says Prasa worked with community leaders and government departments to find alternative land for the occupiers.

In April 2023, Prasa was dealt another blow. Loyiso Nkohla, a community leader who had been helping Prasa, was murdered while addressing a meeting at Philippi station.

“That derailed the plans because all of us felt very unsafe.” It took several months before Prasa re-engaged with the community.

He says a service-level agreement signed recently with the city is vital because co-operation is necessary to provide public transport.

Travel patterns, he says, have changed since the pandemic.

“In the morning, everyone would understand that our traffic would be unidirectional. People come from Fish Hoek, Simon’s Town and Retreat. They all come to the CBD to work. The city is remodelling the travel patterns so that it can better inform the transport operators. The old peak was defined to be between 6am and 9am. We’ve just been advised that the new peak is 5am to 10am,” he says.

When asked about the city’s push for devolution to local management, he says Prasa has a “very solid relationship [with the city]”. But, he says, that is a separate policy discussion.

“I appreciate where the mayor [Geordin Hill-Lewis] comes from. We have a jewel that has been operating and supporting 50,000 families in the Western Cape. We almost lost this jewel.

“The operating standard should be above 95% in terms of on time; less than 1% in terms of train cancellations. But the important thing is that on all corridors, not just the central corridor, during peak we wish to run a train every 10 minutes.

“We are pursuing this vision vigorously, knowing that we are behind … that we took a detour during the state capture years, during Covid, and post-Covid,” says Maseko. He says the aim is to have trains running on the central line to Kapteinsklip station, the terminus in Mitchells Plain, by May. The line runs to Langa and from there one runs to Mitchells Plain, another to Khayelitsha and a third to Bellville via Belhar.

Hill-Lewis says it is pleasing to see the testing on the central line.

“I’m thrilled to see that and I want to give credit where it’s due, to Raymond and the team,” he tells the FM. “It’s been a long time coming but we desperately need to see the trains running in Cape Town. We are having our discussions around the devolution of trains, that will continue as a separate policy discussion, but in the meantime, we really want to see the trains running to alleviate the N2 traffic [the main road route to the Cape Flats].”