Part City

CR’s smart city isn’t.

We don’t need smart cities. We do need to improve those we live in, especially the small platteland ones. While they develop, and after, people will need to reach them better, quicker, more comfortably and as safely as we did in the fifties, when anyone could take a job anywere in South Africa, and get there by train, and did. Get the job, then buy the car, not like today, “borrow to get the car in the hope of getting the job”.

Colesberg to Bloemfontein is a 2^1/2 hour drive each way. It is a too long to be called quick, long enough to be uncomfortable, and challenging if the timing is not right - leaving Colesberg around 5am gets to Bloemfontein in time for rush hour. Then you sit in misted up windows, cursing traffic. To avoid that, leave at 4am, only to kick heels from 6.30 am until places open. What to do? Well, there is a lovely, unused railway line just sitting there, paid for by millions of ancestor tax-payers. Why waste it?

The track

Apart from the hilly sections straddling the Orange River at Naauwpoort Noupoort, that line was, in steam days, a wonderful spirited dash from Springfontein junction to Bloem. It is good, heavy rail. It will support fairly brisk trips at operating speeds of around 140kph in places [read: difficult for cars to catch]. Between 3000 and 8000 vehicles use this section daily. If one percent of that low end are local, that is 30 cars, which at a lift club average of 4 people per car, returns 120 people, just right for our train-set carrying 60 people in each of its two coaches.

SA Meyl

When government shakes itself from its slumbers, it will merge SAPO and Shoshaloza Meyl to form SA Meyl. That way, passengers and parcels can share revenue from both. Using a 1980’s SAR patent, the Scheffel bogie, modern three-coach train-sets built in SA will run happily at 100kph on many platteland branch lines, and up to 160kph on main routes, making any town, country-wide, is no more than an overnight train journey from the port metros.

Turbine Trains

On this Colesberg - Bloem section, we could start with two return trains daily, departing Colesberg/Bloem at 06:00, ETA Bloem at 08:30, and at 16:00 returning for arrival at 18:30. When combined with an app like this, passengers will step straight from the train into a minubus already routed to their destination, or any of the usual ride-hailers. They are a smartphone away. Once demand increases, a 10am depature can run, arriving 12:30, giving enough time for a biz lunch before returning.

The trains themselves can be low-slung, lightweight, but the centre power car, a gas-turbine hybrid with battery backup a power car, could rather recycled from scrapped yellow and grey 5MAT rolling stock, made out of super-strong steel by Union Carriage and Wagon back in the day. Push-pull cars, with driver-cabs on each end, will accommodate 60 people seated in airline-style reclining seats. Power cars will have, on each end, a bistro galley with hot coffee, tea, snacks, pap en vleis and attended by a barrista and a security guard pair.

The inner sections of the centre power car enclose parcels compartment, toilet with nappy changing faciiities, and the power epuipment, being a Capstone Micro Turbine or workalike, alternators and underfloor batteries. The centre car will own its two Jacobs bogies, so that it can go to workshops under its own power, for service.

The trip will begin as with any hybrid car, under battery power. Nearly silent in the towns, without polluting, once operating speed or open country is reached, the turbines spin up. They are a third of the weight of diesel engines, and can burn any fuel, including methane, supplied by the towns they serve. Thos are: Hamilton, Edenburg, Trombsburg, Springfontein. Approaching towns, they turbines will spin down, & regenerative braking will charge batteries until air brakes take over for the last few metres.

Heat was always the problem with early turbine trains, but these trains, in the same way old Shoshaloza coaches had steam pipes for heating running the full length of the train, will direct exhaust down down the train to be used for both heating and aircon.

Digester Dorps

All of these settlements support big enough populations to reticulate sewage and water systems into sealed units, doing away with smelly open slurry reservoirs, producing biogas and digestate water. These plants recover 90% of their input water: how can a water-scarce country not be using them?

Their pumps can be powered by the sun with reserve biogas power for grey and rainy days. Digestate water can be collected into water tankers and railed to sidings for indoor and outdoor crops. Biogas from these settlements, including a share of Bloemfontein’s, will amply fuel the turbine-electric train-sets.

Many of these towns have hectares of unused railway tracks in sidings, fallen out of use since wayside goods collection was abandoned. These sidings, especially those once served by boreholes for steam locomotives, could become temporary housing or hydroponic farms, using converted old 5M2A trainsets, instead of spending billions refurbishing them only to park them to rust in carriage yards. Contrary to what most people think, those over-engineered railway boreholes can be restored. A lot of the old brass casings could support a boutigue industry, manufacturing brass instruments. Old brass is in demand for that: many of the most prized vintage trumpets and trombones were fashioned out of brass shell cases from WWI.

Fares

For this Bloem - Colesberg run, since the fuel is free, a low-cost rail flat fare of (say) R20 could be charged, using QR codes or SMS pins on phones, and doing away with ticket offices (most of which have been vandalised and demolished anyway). There could even be a R60 flat fare including taxi fares on each end: R20 + R20 + R20, if the minibus industry wants involvement.

Bean-counters, doing what they do, will be quick to point out that more people want to go from Colesberg to Bloemfontein than from Bloem to Colesberg. So what? Charge double for people going to Bloem, and nothing for the Bloem - Colesberg trip? Minubuses to and from stations will still get the same for their trips, and Gautrain is alreay doing bus-train-bus on a single ticket.

Wake Up, SA!

Within 2 decades, China built the world’s largest high speed rail network, knowing it would not turn a profit. because it was good for the country. Is it a coincidence that it is the only country to lift billions out of poverty in a generation?

We are asleep. There are maps and people who still talk of “Colesberg Junction”. I know Tuxedo Junction is a cool name for everyone’s favourite trombone tune, but the line “joining” Colesberg to Colesberg Station was lifted just short of a century ago! There is no point to building it again, not in its old route.

Since Colesberg is growing toward Bloemfontein anyway, build the terminus at Steers (aka Ultra), to the north. The township is nearly there aleady. Instead of the line curving eastward straight after Colesberg Station, continue it due north to Steers, from where it has a clear run across the veld to join the line to Norvals Pont about 4 km to the east.

Or, spend a bit more, and make a cracker of a transport hub at Engen, already a busy coach terminus. That way the line could skirt Colesberg on west of the koppies, joining with Arundel flanking the N9, and run around to Steers to the north east. While at it, spend more money and build a cable car to the summit of Coleskop. Colesberg is already a half way house (stolen from Hanover) on the drive to Cape Town, and a tourist attraction to possibly the best view in the Karoo, would put that ‘berg’ on the map even more than it is aleady, with a clear line of sight to the brooding Kompasberg near Nieu Bethesda. No harm in dreaming!

Everything put forward in this article is tried and tested technology. None of it is hard to do. All of it is replicable to several other busy sections in SA, (think Garden Route and Cape Town to Saldanha Bay, Bloemfontein to Kimberley) and exportable to the rest of Africa, which is criss-crossed with Cape and Metre Gauge that our trainset manufacturers can relate to and design for. Anywhere else in the world, this would be an opportunity.

What are they doing?