MyJHB

Stuff from Johannesburg

Shosholoza Meyl Faces Uncertain Future

The Shosholozo Meyl long-distance passenger train service is not currently operating.

PRASA says it plans to restore a “limited service” on four long-distance passenger routes next year. But recent attempts to restore these services have failed because of ageing locomotives. The National Treasury appears to be phasing out PRASA’s funding for repairing or buying new locomotives.

A long-haul service would provide an affordable alternative to flights and buses.

The Shosholoza Meyl service, which operated four routes – between Johannesburg and Durban, Cape Town, East London and Musina via Polokwane – was suspended in 2020 after a fatal collision with a goods train.

Limited operations resumed on the East London and Musina routes in 2022. The Durban and Cape Town routes resumed in December 2023. But passengers experienced cancellations and hours of delays. Three of the four routes were again suspended in October 2024, because the locomotives were “old, unreliable, and repeatedly breaking down”, according to PRASA.

GroundUp reported on a trip between Johannesburg and Durban in March last year. The train broke down several times. The service has since been suspended.

PRASA’s current fleet of ageing diesel locomotives has presented “reliability challenges” resulting in “limited locomotive capacity”, said spokesperson Andiswa Makanda. But, she said, routes between Johannesburg and Queenstown (Komani), Durban, Musina and Cape Town will resume in 2027.

It is unclear where PRASA will find the money for locomotives.

According to the budget tabled in Parliament in February, most of PRASA’s funds will go towards restoring signalling infrastructure for Metrorail, which operates commuter rail services in several metros.

The budget for purchasing new locomotives will halve over three years. Spending on new locomotives peaked at R12-billion in 2025/26 and will drop to R6-billion in 2027/28. Spending to refurbish existing mainline train coaches will be reduced entirely from R200-million last year.

Makanda said the agency is exploring “a range of options to address locomotive capacity constraints”, including leasing locomotives. “Details regarding the type, quantity, and timelines” are yet to be finalised, she said.

The national department of transport did not respond to questions.

Speaking on Radio 702 on Friday morning, transport minister Barbara Creecy said she was “concerned” about how PRASA has dealt with procurement in the past. She said there were “ongoing legacy issues” plaguing the agency, pointing to allegations of irregularities in its administration of the 2022 General Overhaul Programme, aimed at maintaining and refurbishing existing PRASA trains.

© 2026 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.

We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.

Hate crimes: Crimes motivated by prejudice against race, religion, or sexual orientation.

Read More at the Source

Source – MyZA

Free Press Release Submissions from MyPR.co.za

Category:

Ponte City: Transformation

As the “white flight” of the 1980s and 90s drained the inner city of capital, Ponte City underwent a dramatic and terrifying transformation. By the late 1990s, the building had become a “vertical slum” and a symbol of urban decay. It was famously “hijacked” by gangs; the retail levels were stripped, and the building became a fortress for drug dealing and human trafficking. The most haunting image from this era was the central core. Originally designed to be a light-filled courtyard, it became a literal trash heap. Residents on the upper floors would throw their refuse into the center of the building rather than taking it down. At its worst point, the trash in the core reached five stories high—a mountain of rotting debris, discarded furniture, and even, legend has it, the remains of those who had fallen or jumped.

During this period, the reputation of Ponte was so toxic that there was a serious proposal in 1998 to turn the entire skyscraper into a vertical prison. The plan was eventually scrapped, but the building remained a “no-go zone” for nearly a decade. The turnaround began in the mid-2000s when developers New Metro Property Group and later Dlala Nje began a massive, painstaking refurbishment. They cleared out the tons of trash from the core, restored the lifts (which had often been out of order, forcing residents to climb 50 flights of stairs), and implemented strict security protocols.