The Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa) has once again promised to have trains running in Soweto.
Prasa’s regional programme manager Victor Stemer on Monday said despite the challenges in getting parts on time, the agency was on course to bring back services to the country’s biggest township.
He was speaking as transport minister Fikile Mbalula officially opened the Pienaarspoort to Pretoria Central line after services were suspended for infrastructure repairs in May.
“The next corridor that we are going to recover is Naledi to Johannesburg. From here, our focus goes there. We anticipate that the service will start in November. This month we are doing the final testing and by next month commuters can expect the services to resume. We also have Tembisa to Johannesburg, which will come after the Naledi line,” Stemer said.
However, he said when services are restored in Soweto, the new blue trains used in Pienaarspoort would not immediately be available in the southern corridor.
The restoration of the Pienaarspoort line follows the Mabopane to Pretoria central line, which was restored in January.
The Pienaarspoort line cost Prasa about R300m to recover as most of the work was on electrical supply to the trains, which included overhead cables and substations.
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The restored line uses the new blue trains known as Isitimela Sabantu and will offer a limited service from 4am to 8pm as the signalling system has not yet been fully repaired.
To provide this service, two trains run throughout the day operating on a manual system with the driver communicating with someone in the control room.
There are a total of 16 stations from Pienaarspoort to Pretoria Central.
Out of these stations, the train stops at 13 while the others are still being refurbished.
The government introduced the restoration of rail corridors in April 2021, after infrastructure was vandalised and looted due to a lack of security just before the beginning of the lockdown in 2020.
As the government implemented the lockdown, vandalism got worse, forcing the agency to shut down most of Gauteng’s rail lines.
Stemer said the biggest challenge for the restoration of corridors had been procurement.
“It has never happened before that we find ourselves at one point having to restore railway infrastructure at this magnitude. Throughout the time what we (Prasa and Transnet) have been doing is buying components for maintenance.
“Our suppliers maintained a certain production rate based on maintenance. Now, all of a sudden we require 20 times what they normally supplied...The market could not cope with the supply, which has now forced us to recover corridor by corridor to allow them time to recover,” Stemer said.
Transformers for substations are being imported.
He added that they had ensured that more than 200 people benefited from the work in order to impart skills within communities along the corridor.
Stemer said Prasa had started deploying protection services even during construction to ensure that vandalism was not repeated.
Refilwe Maela who travels from her home in Pienaarspoort to work in Denneboom was relieved with the return of the trains.
“It is good news for me because it is the cheapest mode of transport. I earn too little to cope with the cost of transport. In a train I spend about R75 a week but a taxi will cost me R150 a week. I get to make some savings, which I can use to buy lunch or give money for lunch to my two children,” Maela said.
dlaminip@sowetan.co.za
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