Perhaps our trains can be cleaned up to Indian standards

YESTERDAY was the start of National Transport Month, to be celebrated by yet another increase in the petrol price tomorrow and a transport conference next week.

I hadn’t meant to write about this earth-shaking event designed to keep us on the move, but a correspondent in Die Burger evoked in me a mood of nostalgia for a form of transportation that has seen better days – train travel.

Pieter Visser of Wellington bemoaned the deterioration of the longdistance rail service. He grew up in Usakos, Namibia, when there were three lines running between Usakos and Kranzberg, and train journeys to Paarl, where he attended school, taking three days and three nights.

It was just outside Usakos, many years ago, that our car crashed into an ox when the driver tried to pass the vehicle ahead in a cloud of dust, and we returned to Windhoek from Swakopmund on an overnight train, with much shunting of us back and forth at Usakos, a junction.

Since then I’ve gone out of my way to travel by train wherever possible. As a student I travelled on the same train from Johannnesburg to Cape Town as Sheila Camerer, now our ambassador in Bulgaria, but then about to be crowned UCT rag queen. I also trundled to and from upcountry political congresses by train, because the Cape Times wanted to save on air fares.

The accountants didn’t realise I preferred trains, anyway.

There was nothing to beat drinks in the dining saloon as the sun sank over the Karoo.

During my various visits to India I have travelled the length and breadth of the sub-continent on its legendary trains, the very first time from Mumbai to Delhi on the Passhim Express (“second class, air-conditioned, reclining chair – most comfortable, but don’t leave luggage unattended, bad people abound,” my guide warned me).

Also on the Howrah Mail, two days and two nights up the Bay of Bengal from Chennai to Kolkata, feeding beggars with bananas from our window at all the major stations, from Kolkata to Varanasi sharing a compartment with an MP in tweed jacket and dhoti who made his servant squat on the floor, from Varanasi to Mumbai with a conductor who beat away would-be fellow passengers from our compartment with the often-expressed hope we would reward him with untold riches, from Shimla in the Himalayas down to Kalka, a six-hour trip through 100 tunnels in the narrowgauge “toy train”, in the company of the local police chief who lived in Rudyard Kipling’s old house.

More recently we shared a compartment from Delhi to Siliguri with a colonel in the Indian Army (like my wife, he was a Catholic), on his way to patrol the border between Sikkim and Tibet.

The point is that all these Indian trains were cleaner and better run than South African intercity trains, if Pieter Visser’s experience is anything to go by. A week or two ago he travelled in the Shosholoza Meyl from Klerksdorp. The food in the saloon was downgraded to the level of a “fish-and-chips cafe”, but even that could have been tolerated were it not for the general filthy condition of the coaches, the toilets, the showers and the stations.

If National Transport Month and its ministerial conferences can do anything to improve our trains, I may be tempted to travel on them again. But meanwhile I’ll have to restrict my rail journeys to other countries.