After Prasa’s dramatic derailment, is it possible to get back on track?

Not long after World War 2, the Japanese government took a huge bet on rail. It was controversial at the time because the world was moving towards road and air transport at a rapid pace. The rail network in Japan, as in South Africa, was generally narrow gauge, so building a new high-speed network would require a start-from-scratch approach.

The bet was based on physics. Rail transport, when implemented correctly, is more efficient in respect of both energy and time than road or air travel. But the capital cost of the construction exercise is, of course, far higher than road transport, particularly since the major capital item in the latter is borne on the balance sheet of the traveller.

Nevertheless, in the economic boom that followed Japan’s reconstruction, the head of the Japanese railways, Shinji Sogō, was convinced that a high-speed rail system would work and managed to convince politicians that it was worth a try. In 1959, construction began between Tokyo and Osaka, and the Shinkansen was born. The estimated cost was 200-billion yen, but when the line was completed four years later, the true cost ended up being double that. Sogō resigned.

But the line was a fabulous success. In 2017, it carried 159 million passengers. The distance between Tokyo and Osaka is about 500km, and the train takes about three hours, with one leaving every half an hour. The train has carried about six billion passengers over the past five decades. The network has expanded dramatically and the trains have got faster. The success of Shinkansen inspired high-speed trains all over the world. And obviously, the trains leave on time. A few years ago, the rail service took out national advertisements to apologise when one of the trains left 20 seconds early.

If it is not too depressing, let us now change our focus to South Africa's Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa). It’s an unfair comparison. It’s like comparing a Fiat Uno with a Ferrari, and that comparison does a disservice to the Fiat Uno.

And yet, is it so unfair? South Africa started building railways in 1859 and never stopped. SA has a rail network of 36,000km. That’s actually larger than the rail network in Japan. The big failure in SA has been — you guessed it — management. We kinda know the story. In 2012, Prasa paid a company called Swifambo Rail Leasing R3.5-billion to deliver locomotives, which it did, but sadly they were too tall and didn’t fit under SA bridges. Years later, Swifambo’s director, Auswell Mashaba, admitted to the Zondo Commission that he paid the ANC R80-million.