A fire in February this year damaged two coaches and destroyed one.
To add to Transnet’s woes, its crown jewel, the Blue Train, is indefinitely out of action after a fire in February destroyed a coach and damaged two others.
Nineteen coaches were derailed in November last year. Three are still at the derailment site in Germiston and 16 are at the Koedoespoort engineering facility, where the fire occurred.
The cause of the derailment is still under investigation. Transnet spokesperson Ayanda Shezi said the investigation, which is almost complete, would not be affected by the incident at Koedoespoort.
All the security officers were on duty when the fire broke out between 2am and 3am on 8 February. The facility has four gates manned by security officials while others patrol the site night and day.
Sonja Carstens, the spokesperson for the United National Transport Union, said the cables of a Blue Train coach that was idling and connected to an electricity supply were cut, causing sparks to fly and set the coach on fire. One of the three vandals implicated was caught by Transnet security personnel and handed over to the police, who are investigating the crime. The other two suspects got away.
The Mail & Guardian last month reported how the luxurious Blue Train derailed for a second time in three months; first on 8 November last year at Union Station near Germiston and again on 16 January at the Salvokop trainyard in Pretoria. Insiders who are unwilling to be named, painted a picture of deterioration that has been going on for years.
After this exposé, on 12 February, Nomasonto Ndlovu, the executive manager of tourism heritage and hospitality at Transnet, advised Blue Train staff members that: “Due to safety considerations the business has taken the decision to suspend Blue Train operations in order to conduct a full analysis following the recent unfortunate incidents that have befallen the Blue Train.”
Ndlovu was interviewed on 28 January by Radio 702’s Bongani Bingwa about the state of the Blue Train, after an interview with a former Blue Train manager, Herbert Prinsloo, who was dismissed in 2016 after alerting his superiors to the dire state of the train.
Prinsloo, as well as previous and current Transnet employees who spoke on condition of anonymity, claim that major technical problems highlighted at the safety meeting in 2016 have never been resolved.
Plagued by problems: Nineteen of the Blue Train’s coaches derailed in November last year
In the radio interview, Ndlovu said that despite the two derailments (in November 2021 and January 2022) the Blue Train was in good shape as a result of Transnet’s “daily, monthly and annual” maintenance schedule.
“As I talk to you now, the train is on the railway and it is actually in Cape Town. Now remember Bongani, we cannot put that train on the railway if it was not meeting the high standards of the Railway Safety Regulator, so I am not sure where the gentleman is coming from,” she said.
Were the coaches damaged in the November derailment put back on the railway tracks?
According to Ndlovu, in the winter months of June and July the Blue Train shuts down and both trains are fully serviced. But if one checks reservations for the Blue Train it is evident that bookings are being taken for that period.
Ndlovu declined to be interviewed by the Mail & Guardian.
At the 2016 meeting that was the beginning of the end for Prinsloo’s 37-year career, he presented photographs showing the state of the train and recorded the meeting, attended by Transnet’s leaders as well as senior engineers and technicians.
Part of the recorded discussion went as follows:
Voice 1: “Let me put it this way, if you have to look at the pictures, you will find that there are oil leaks there; there is this there; there are broken pipes, there … I am saying once you start looking at that and saying: this is for brakes, this is for whatever … How do we get to a space where we say we need to park it or cannibalise it or put it to a memorial or whatever?”
Voice 2: “It has gone so bad that they [the bogies, an assembly of wheels forming a pivoted support at either end of a railway coach to provides flexibility on curves] deviated from the real diameters under the coach, which is absolutely criminal.
“It is absolutely shocking but let’s not create the perception today that the train is inherently unsafe. Let’s not create that perception.”
Voice 1: “It’s not a perception.”
Voice 2: “The maintenance has deteriorated but the train is not unsafe. I would be the first to say ‘stop the train’. When we had an incident, I arranged that they reduce the speed at a huge cost to us. That is the sort of reversal I will take.”
Voice 1: “What I am saying, and I am saying it eloquently, I don’t have the English words to say it … I am saying, yes, it has deteriorated dramatically. So it is a ticking time bomb. It hasn’t exploded but in the state that it is in, if something was to go, we are done. If the cushion that you are talking about goes, we are done. If the valves that you are talking about go, we are done.”
Questions sent by the M&G to Transnet remain unanswered.
Meanwhile, there is speculation by former Transnet employees and consultants about why the Blue Train was left in Germiston, which is notoriously unsafe; why no security and technical personnel were on site, and whether standard procedures were followed to secure the train.
Prinsloo said that when he worked for Transnet, “when the train arrives in Pretoria or Cape Town, they have a brake pipe that they connect at the back of the train, working with a compressor that applies the brakes. Then they put scotch blocks behind the wheels … If the scotch blocks were there and the hand brakes were tightened, the train would not have run away. It sounds like the hand brakes are still not working, even today.”
One Blue Train is being repaired at Koedoespoort and the other at Salvokop.
Apart from reputational damage, the suspension of Blue Train services has financial implications for Transnet because it attracts passengers who can afford the tickets. The Luxury Double rate per person sharing is R32 985 in the low season and R40 310 in the high season.
The story unfolds against revelations at the Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture that Transnet was responsible for 72.2% of all the irregular transactions. Transnet awarded R41.2-billion in irregular tenders to companies with ties to the Gupta family and R60-billion in contracts to unfairly benefit Chinese manufacturers. Transnet’s audited condensed consolidated financial results for the year ended 31 March 2021 show a net loss of R8.4-billion.
[/membership]