Shosholoza: The Train to a Better Economy

The year is 2010.
It’s a cool summer evening and I’m still small enough that my mother is carrying me on her back. 
She is climbing up a flight of stairs alongside my late aunt who had come to visit us in Grasmere. 
I lift my gaze to the south and a bright light emerges from a little hole and is quickly revealed to be attached to a long yellow and grey metal snake that makes the tracks ahead of it hiss. 
“TRAIN NUMBER 9005 TO JOZI, TRAIN NUMBER 9005 TO JOZI, PLEASE HAVE YOUR TICKET READY” the fuzzy voice from the PA speaker says.
My aunt says goodbye to my mother and she quickly makes her way to the platform and disappears into the yellow snake. As my mother complains about how I’m too old to be carried on her back and subsequently lets me down; I watch the snake disappear towards Mid-Ennerdale and into the night sky until its bright light is no more.

This is my earliest memory of the Metrorail.

Love it or hate it, the Metrorail is an iconic part of South Africa’s
working-class’s culture and it played a monumental role in
making Johannesburg (and ultimately South Africa)
the African economic juggernaut it is today. A lot has changed
in terms of consumer behaviour when it comes to transport
but trains remain very relevant even in the world of
Ubers and Rea Vayas but I’ve been paying
attention to our embracement of the return of
the Metrorail via the “People’s Train” and I feel that
we as Ama2000 are not giving it a chance.
To be fair, most of us born after 1999 have never seen Metrorail
fully functional and the little we’ve seen is dilapidated stations,
ageing trains and uncultured characters on the trains (to put it lightly).

So I thought why not take a look at the history of our passenger rail sector, its evolution, and how it could be a lifeline
for a wallet conscious and aesthetically inclined generation such as Gen-Z.

 In 1958, the Apartheid government approached an English train manufacturer called Metro-Cammell to design and manufacture the earliest mass produced passenger train in South Africa. The program however, lasted a few years as Union Carriage & Wagon; a local consortium (“consortium” basically means “group”) would take over the program, manufacturing over 4000 coaches from 1962 to 1985. These were known as the 5M2A’s.

The train above is the 5M2A train.
This was our first passenger train meant to transport thousands
to and from work Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town
(the only cities that have the Metrorail)
and this would be the genesis of the present day passenger rail system.
These trains are so old that my great-grandmother took them to go to work as
a domestic worker in the then upmarket Hillbrow area in the mid 80s;
she would board at Merafe station and disembark at Park Station.

My grandmother would then replace my great-grandmother in the workforce,
not as a domestic worker but as a seamstress at the Transvaal Clothing Company.
She too would board at Merafe Station but would disembark at Doornfontein station
(this is late 80s to early 90s).  “Back then, there was so much order, there’d be a
white man in a police officer’s uniform who would check our tickets and we wouldn’t dare
set foot near First Class, we weren't allowed in there because no blacks were allowed.
I remember the doors were wooden and the train wasn’t yellow, it was red!
The trains were always full but there was order." 
This is an account from my grandmother when questioned by my 10 year old sister
how she got around in the 80s without using Uber.  I wasn’t sure what she meant as
I was accustomed to the yellow trains with barely any ticket examiners, filled to the brim with
passengers who didn’t buy their tickets and sometimes even sitting between the carriages.

I was used to the infamous Dumane coach (the very last coach well-known as a place where
people smoked weed and played dice) and the several hawkers who sold anything
from peanuts to combs to make-up sets to even headsets
( I was a very loyal customer to the headset hawkers). This was the order of the day when
I, some 30 years later, became a Metrorail commuter on my occasional trips
from Grasmere station to Lenasia station where I’d spend some lunch money
I had saved to buy a pie at Lenz Square. The Metrorail in the 2010s had a stench of corruption
around its name as everyone had heard a story about someone who had gotten mugged on the train,
or had to walk 5km to their home station because the train broke down 4 stations away.
In short, this was no longer the safe and orderly trains that my grandmother thanked
for a cheap commute during her working days.

But I knew no different, I couldn't see the issue but my perspective changed
with the introduction of the latest train models.

To be honest I was never interested in passenger rail but it wasn’t until
Covid slashed Finetown’s working class in half and my grandmother could no longer afford
to go to church in Chiawelo, that I saw the relevance of a functional and affordable rail service.
There’s one recurring theme in the stories my grandmother always tells about
that era of the Metrorail; order. “There was so much order, “it was so safe” and of course;
“it was so clean”.

In First World countries, trains are an integral part of economies.
Think of any First World city; Berlin in Germany, New York in America,
London in the UK or Amsterdam in the Netherlands. In these countries, trains aren't merely an option
but a very popular staple for going to work, doing groceries or going on a date.
This has several benefits as train tickets tend to be dirt cheap (government subsidies help drive down costs)
and it reduces traffic for there will be fewer people in cars, meaning that people and
commercial goods will arrive to their destinations quicker and on time.
This also has benefits for the climate as fewer cars obviously means less pollution
leading to a healthier environment where people live longer. The list goes on and on.

Bottom line: train good for climate, train good for people and train good for wallet.

A train at Amsterdam Central Station where a day ticket starts from R166 ZAR;
 a Metrorail ticket is R8.50 ZAR 

When I realised how rail travel is not neglected in the previously mentioned countries but rather preserved and
very much respected and also the several benefits that come with rail travel, I began to look at
our “People’s Train” differently; not as a novelty but as a gem.

But how did we get to where we are with the Metrorail today, where public trust is so low and they fight the
uphill battle of convincing the very same commuters they betrayed that
they are a viable alternative to other modes of transport?

The answer is a bit complicated and I could fall into a tangent explaining the shady dealings that took place
at executive level at PRASA before 2015 but to be brief, the corruption that took place can be personified by
Lucky Montana and the Swifambo and Vossloh scandal (basically the executives at PRASA stole the
money to make new trains, together with a Spanish company they stole around 3.5 billion Rand!)
and many more mismanagement issues like not protecting infrastructure at stations and not
heavily enforcing the sale of tickets as well as unintelligent business decisions that in hindsight,
were meant to fatten the pockets of political fat cats (consider the secession from Transnet and
the formation of PRASA and under PRASA; Metrorail) and these issues led to the rail agency basically
being a shadow of its former self with the number of commuters falling from 43 million passengers in 1999 to
1.7 million in 2022 but discussing these issues would need an article on its own.
So now you have an idea of what made PRASA fall apart but what I want to discuss
at this point in the article is how much PRASA has always had potential by
looking at how many other models came after the 5M2A.
Less than 20 years into the lifespan of the 5M2A there were already efforts to replace them and below
I briefly list the updated trains that were
meant to relieve the 5M2As.

Above is the 6M; presumably the direct successor of the 5M2A

This is the prototype 7M, it seems as though this Siemens manufactured model never came to exist publicly.

This is the 8M that I found no pictures of outside of Cape Town.

The much more common 10M that was essentially a refurbished 5M2A.

Finally, the X’trapolis Mega.

So there’s been an entire timeline of events that has quietly happened in our rail sector and most of us weren't even aware. But now that we know where we come from; where to from now?

Here’s the deal; these X’trapolis Megas? ( the “People’s Train” you see pictured above) are manufactured by a company called Gibela Rail Consortium and this consortium is made up of Alstom(that owns the company that made the Gautrain and the company that made the 5M2A) that owns 70% and the rest by Ubumbano Rail Consortium; yes another group of companies (involved with the Gautrain's operation). They received the contract to manufacture the (600) trains in 2013 but the deal was that at its core the project had to use local materials and a local workforce and so a factory had to be specially built in Ekurhuleni and people had to be trained on how to make the trains. 

So the first few trains were made in Brazil with South Africans on the team making those prototypes using local steel that was exported along with them so they would learn with the very materials they’d be using. In 2018 the prototypes returned to SA and in 2019 the factory’s construction was completed but as soon as things were looking up Covid happened and manufacturing obviously came to a halt but fast forward 2022 and production resumed and here we are today.
These trains are much more modern than the outgoing models aesthetically and ergonomically as they are more spacious, are fitted with very functional air conditioners with autonomous doors and digital upgrades like a heads up display that includes travel information, date and time, not to mention very visible security presence making one feel very safe. All of these little things combined with the punctuality of the trains and a dirt cheap fare for a ticket make for a very dignified commute to work or school.

The mentee and the mentor. I always like to joke that the train on 
the right is so old that I could have sat on the same seat
Hendrik Verwoerd once sat on.

However, the improvements are not only happening with the trains themselves as PRASA is upgrading a lot of the infrastructure involved with operating such modern trainsets and more importantly for commuters, PRASA is refurbishing the stations and seriously upgrading security. I never thought in my lifetime I’d briskly walk throughout town, highly vigilant( as one does) and only feel somewhat safe at Park Station of all places!
Now I know that many of our parastatals have let us down as they’ve fallen apart because of very avoidable reasons, mainly being corruption. With that said, a lot of us are untrusting and reluctant to believe that PRASA has turned a new leaf. “It’s only a matter of time until they loot the money for the security personnel or they stop running the trains on time” but I've commuted with the trains on multiple occasions and I have to tell you things have really changed for the better within the management structures. 

The penultimate reason why I was driven to write this article and I mentioned the relevance of passenger rail in first world countries is so that I could introduce to Gen Z the concept of using trains instead of private transport as our main form of transport. 
I recently had a very important arrangement to fulfil with someone close to me in Sandton and I couldn’t have afforded the trip as a student if it weren’t for the trains.
I caught a train from Merafe station in Soweto, connected to a Gautrain from Park Station to Sandton Station and the trip cost me around 35 Rands.
The metro rail arrived at Park 9:00 sharp and the Gautrain characteristically left about 15 minutes later.
I realised how feasible the train would be as an option to commute as a university student in town; getting off at Braamfontein station if you’re a UJ student and getting off at Park station if you’re a Wits, Rosebank or CJC student and if you’re employed a bit further up the M1 you can connect to the Gautrain as I did for my important appointment mentioned earlier.

As a generation that has been shown the middle finger by the global economy, rising inflation and a high cost of living, being employed has become a privilege and affording to travel to that very job can be a large factor that determines whether or not you earn well. With that said, an affordable, reliable and cheap way to commute is essential if we’ll ever be able to sustain ourselves as adults.

The Metrorail is no longer the obscure yellow steel snake that was infamous for muggings, lawlessness and overcrowding it once was. Now the experience is contemporary so much so that I may even compare it to the Gautrain. 

To wrap up my little rant, I hope the improvements are permanent and that we become a generation of workers that will embrace and sternly protect its country's assets, beginning with our beautiful rail.