Moves to get SA’S dream of high-speed rail on track
THE Department of Transport will commission its first independent, nationwide study into the cost and feasibility of high-speed trains between major cities, running at speeds as high as 400km/h.
A tender for the study will be issued this year, department deputy director-general for integrated transport planning Mawethu Vilana said yesterday.
High-speed trains require a wider gauge than the one used throughout SA. The Gautrain is SA’s only standard-gauge railway.
“The future of rail is high speed,” Mr Vilana said. In the “intermediate” term, the focus of the government, through state-owned commuter rail company the Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa), was on getting “higher speeds” of between 140km/h and 160km/h on the narrow-gauge infrastructure.
“Certainly, going forward, we need to move to high-speed, standard-gauge rail,” said Prasa strategic network planning GM Hishaam Emeran.
For high-speed rail to succeed it must offer a “competitive journey time of about four hours over distances of 800km-1,000km,” he said, after which the trains would start to compete with airlines.
In the discussions on high-speed trains, “Durban to Johannesburg features strongly”, he said, adding that Cape Town to Johannesburg was also being mooted, “but that is a bit on long side … (unless) you start building key intermediate stops such as Kimberley or Bloemfontein and it starts opening up — you get a different picture then”.
There was also “huge demand from Polokwane to Gauteng, and then even further north. The feasibility studies will indicate where that is necessary,” he said.
SA has been flirting with the idea of high-speed trains for the past few years. Most recently the idea of a train hurtling between Johannesburg and Durban enjoyed attention at a conference in Midrand in January, when Japan International Consultants said it had costed the construction of a line between the two cities at about R160bn.
According to Mr Emeran, the Durban-to-Johannesburg route was a “medium priority to long term” while the Johannesburg-to-Cape Town service was a “low priority to long term”.