TRAVEL

On this week’s ST Travel Podcast, we take a train ride with Rohan Vos, the dreamer-inchief at Rovos Rail, which operates the Pride of Africa, the most luxurious train in the world.

The idea started, like so many good ones, in the bath. Vos was having a good old soak when he thought he should buy a steam engine and a couple of old railway carriages — and in the late ’80s there were plenty around that the railways didn’t want — and take the family travelling around South Africa. It would be, he thought, a sort of family caravan on rails.

The railway administration had other plans — and allowing a private family train on their rails was not one of them. After a lot of pestering, however, they told Vos he could sell tickets for his train.

When he launched Rovos Rail and began running the Pride of Africa train on long, steam-hauled journeys from Pretoria to Nelspruit and up the forested flanks of the Escarpment to Sabie and Graskop, people said one of two things about him: either he was a visionary or he was barking mad.

Thirty years later, the train is a South African icon. But it hasn’t been an easy ride.

Listen to the story on today’s Sunday Times Travel podcast at Iono.fm — direct link is iono.fm/c/3763.