Mbaks gets war room

As part of the 100-day commitment to turn around the state of South African railways, Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula and the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) launched a war room.

It is a tool to track the progress of the plan to modernise and improve SA’s railways.

At the core of this turnaround strategy is a process to modernise infrastructure and technology that is long outdated.

Prasa and Mbalula toured the old and new in Gauteng’s railways.

“As a build-up to this launch, this morning we visited the signal cabin in Germiston, which embodies the challenges Prasa faces in controlling train movement using outdated technology, prone to human error due to the chronic cable theft that affects the daily movement of trains,” Mbalula said.

“We later visited the Gauteng nerve centre in Thembisa – a state-of-theart facility that will enable Prasa to monitor the entirety of the Gauteng network from one location and enable rapid response when challenges arise.’’

Outdated train platforms need to be upgraded, migrated and then commissioned or integrated into the new nerve centre in Thembisa. So far, 48 of the 98 platforms in Gauteng have been migrated. By June next year, Prasa plans to have 80% of all Gauteng platforms connected to the nerve centre.

Prasa and the department of transport have been in the process of modernisation for three years and the 100-day commitment is an incentive to pick up the speed.

The war room in Prasa’s offices will be the “game changer”, Mbalula said.

“Those deployed to the war room [will] make rapid decisions based on the information they gather from the operations on the ground on an hour-by-hour basis.’’

It will track service recovery, safety management and the modernisation programme, as well as organisational and operation progress within the 100 days.

Mbalula has until December 31 to show an improvement and he added that there is an urgency to address the crisis.

“The urgency of Prasa’s turnaround cannot be overemphasised and tangible results must be realised in the shortest possible time,’’ he said. –