Prasa: a makeover, please — not mere cosmetics
Prasa has been placed under administration – but will that be enough to solve its list of problems?
When the Canadian government announced in 1992 it planned to privatise Canadian National (CN) — the inefficient, money-guzzling state-owned railway — it was nearly laughed out of office."It’ll be like putting lipstick on a pig," one analyst noted derisively.But it worked out pretty well for CN, now one of the world’s biggest and most profitable railways.The Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa), operator of the country’s commuter and long-distance passenger trains, had its own lipstick moment — though we didn’t exactly know it then — in March 2015, when the first new locomotives it had ever owned were craned ashore in Cape Town harbour in front of various dignitaries.The locomotives, built by Vossloh in Spain, were, as it turned out, too tall to fit safely under the overhead electric wires that cover much of the country’s 22,000km rail network.It was a most basic error, which even a quick look at the spec sheet would have revealed — the height of the loco compared with the country’s ...
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