By JASPER COOK
In 1985, I needed a break from Jozi. The Karoo was calling again. ‘Time,’ I thought, ‘to do some work on Toverberg Indaba. And a change is as good as a holiday.’
I booked by phone, and got a seat on the next morning’s Port Elizabeth Express, called the ‘Delagoa Blitz’. It was my first time on that train, all the more exciting because it was a new service, and it slashed nine hours off the previous Spoornet trip from Johannesburg to Port Elizabeth.
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I slipped onto the train perhaps 20 minutes before departure, scheduled for 8 am. A uniformed conductor greeted me in my coach, checked my ticket, and said: ‘Colesberg. Seat 17A, window seat.’
He checked my luggage tickets, took the baggage, and packed it in a rack next to one of two doors on each side of the coach. Back at my seat, he asked if everything was all right, and passed me a breakfast menu. Shortly after passing Germiston, a voice on the train’s public address system said: ‘Greetings, passengers, we are passing through Union Station, current speed 130 kilometres an hour, next stop Meyerton.’
The attendant then brought my order: a flask of black coffee, fruit salad, and Eggs Benedict. ‘Enjoy,’he said. ‘We are due in Bloemfontein at 11h55, and Colesberg at 14h00. I will prepare your luggage for Colesberg shortly before arrival. Please be ready to alight from the train when we approach. We stop for two minutes only.’
This was good. I had first planned to leave at 18h00, but that would have meant that Maeder Osler would need to pick me up from Colesberg station at midnight. Much better for him to drive the 30 minutes from the farm just after a post-lunch nap.
Soon after Meyerton, we flashed through Koppies Station at 160 kph. This seemed to be the train’s cruising speed on straight sections, and about half an hour later we stopped in Sasolburg and Vanderbijlpark in quick succession. The countryside flashed by, and we pulled into Kroonstad at 09h35. My seat was very comfortable, an airline style recliner. I had dozed off after breakfast, and could hardly believe the Kroonstad signs as we pulled into the platform.
We stopped at Brandfort at 11h20. A scheduled stop followed at Glenn, where some students, surely studying agriculture at the agricultural college, disembarked, joshing one another. While under way, the sound-proofing was eerily efficient. However, with the doors opened as they got out, I heard one say: ‘Jislaaik, ‘n rapsie oor drie ure, en hier is ons.’
After this, the train quickly reeled off the remaining distance to Bloemfontein at 160 km/h. I ordered lunch, served as we hurtled past Reddersburg. Edenburg, Trompsburg and Springfontein followed in quick succession.
The pace slackened a little as we got into the hills before the Orange River. We gonged our way across the bridge at Norvalspont, and braked fiercely into Colesberg platform perhaps 15 minutes after. The attendant had placed my luggage next to the door. He called me, hefted my small suitcase onto the platform, collected my luggage tickets, and hopped back on the train with a cheery: ‘Have a good day.’ I watched as the train accelerated out of the station, heading towards Noupoort.
Maeder was waiting on the platform. We discussed the rain, the ‘boerdery’, the usual things to catch up on, and then drove to the Law Clinic for the business at hand, namely putting the next issue of Toverberg Indaba to bed. We worked on a PC, a trusty IBM clone, containing all the files in WordPerfect 5.1.
It could have happened!
By know, readers would have realised that the above didn’t really happen. I did work on Toverberg Indaba, and I did travel there by train, but on the usual leisurely one.
By repurposing Metroblitz as a mainline train, South African Railways could easily been first in the world to provide a rapid passenger train service on a Cape Gauge main line. They held the Cape Gauge world speed record at 245 km/h. It had done JHB to Bloem in 3 hours 51 minutes, averaging 108 km/h. [Editor’s note: MetroBlitz was an experimental high speed commuter train service between Pretoria and Johannesburg via Germiston, which ran for a year from January 1984 to 1985. For a quick hit on the fascinating story of MetroBlitz, click here.]
Then, it’s like they said, ‘Well, boys, we did it. We got the record, and we can easily do Bloem in under four hours.’ And then they went back to sleep. It took another 14 years for a quickish Cape Gauge train to come along, and Australia was where it happened.
The SAR’s Class 6E1 Series 4 no. E1525 electric locomotive with nose cone during high speed testing. In 1978, no. E1525 was modified for experiments in high speed traction by re-gearing the traction motors and installing SAR-designed Scheffel bogies and a streamlined nose cone. In this configuration, E1525 reached a speed of 245 km/h on 31 October 1978, a still unbeaten world record on 3 feet 6 inches (1,067 mm ) Cape Gauge track. Text and image: Philmar du Plessis, Wikimedia Commons.
Queensland Rail Tilt Trains (Cape Gauge)
For a comparison to the MetroBlitz test trip from Johannesburg to Bloem, Queensland Rail Tilt Trains do a similar distance at an average speed of 78 km/h, 30 km/h slower than MetroBlitz from Johannesburg to Bloemfontein.
Tilting does not actually help a train to corner faster, but does prevent passenger panic. Without it, the centripetal force tends to push passengers sideways on their seats. Tilting keeps them in their seats, prevents bottles from falling over, and feels more natural in corners. The technology adds expensive complexity to a train. Instead, MetroBlitz relied only on Mr Herbert Scheffel’s clever newly patented bogies, so the cornering was a bit dramatic!
The Queensland Rail tilt trains are completely under computer control for every metre of the track, basically a train ‘auto-pilot’, controlling not only the cornering speed, but also the degree of tilt. The tighter the corner, the sharper the tilt, to a maximum of five degrees from vertical. That makes it even more remarkable that MetroBlitz covered the JHB to Bloem section completely under the control of its driver. He must have had minimal experience at those speeds, suggesting that Herbert Scheffel’s bogie design is superior.
Own goal
South African Railways scored an own goal here. Its objections to reworking MetroBlitz for main line were not trivial: expenditure on that kind of infrastructure is never so, but hindsight tells us (what us rail fans knew in the first place) that it was money we could not afford not to spend, and was way less than laying new Standard Gauge. The chief concern mentioned was level crossings. This seems daft now. The fear was that accidents would result from people unused to the higher speeds. So what? We know now that people get used to everything, and however one looks at it, that is rather easy to overcome.
Signalling would have been another consideration. From a train driver’s standpoint, some signals would have needed different placement for timely high-speed visibility. So what? That was also no mystery. Just relocate the blankety-blank signals! Livestock on the line? Too bad! Shouldn’t be there! Back in the day, SAR repudiated claims out of hand: I know, I once processed hundreds of them. Very few were paid out.
We will wait 20 years for quickish intercity train travel. When it comes it will be Standard Gauge, following the Gautrain pattern, and will be much better for that — on its own track, and unhindered by goods. But we could have had dramatically quicker intercity for a generation already without spending an arm and a leg, if someone had displayed the political will of Mbhazima Shilowa, then premier of Gauteng, and the foresight and leadership of Gautrain CEO Jack van der Merwe.
Gautrain was and is still sometimes said to be a “vanity project”. Funny that – is that why, long before lockdown, it was set to expand to Mamelodi, Lanseria and Soweto?
Chicken or beef?
If only the bosses had given the go-ahead, we would by now be able to go from Jozi to EL in in nine hours, to Gqeberha in 11 hours, Musina and Maputo in six hours, and Cape Town in 16 hours. Carriages would have been updated to offer USB and 15 amp plug points, with public address and internet connectivity, as has been done with both Shosholoza Meyl and Premier Classe coaches. Catering would be airline-style. Breakfast in Jozi, lunch in Colesberg. Sigh.
Maybe, we will revert to the ‘Meyl’ on the train, since most of our airlines are gone. But wait — so has the Post Office.
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FEATURED IMAGE: SAR Class 6E1 Series 4 E1525 — the unit modified for experiments in high speed traction –at Danskraal, Ladysmith, KwaZulu-Natal. Image and caption by John Middleton, Wikimedia Commons.
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This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on Jasper Cook’s blog, Scazima. Used with permission.