With the World Cup now
just around the corner, a Twitter invite
to join what they call a tweetup for the Gautrain
was just unmissable. Last Saturday I joined a motley crew of Internet geeks and
other strange characters at the Midrand station; mission for the day, to check
out the *actual* Gautrain.
Little did we realize that the company
putting it all together, the Bombela Consortium, would let us get on the train.
Even littler did we realize that we would get treated to a burn up and down the
tracks to see what all the fuss is about.
Now this train is impressive. It runs on
wider-gauge tracks than our 'normal' trains do, it is more powerful than the
same trains which run in Europe, owing to the steeper gradients of 4% which are
encountered on the Reef, it is almost completely silent, it is air-conditioned
and it is fast - speeds of up to 160km/h are possible. And as the Bombela chap
pointed out, when you're hooking it at this pace, you're not going to have to worry
about a spietcop leaping out of the undergrowth.
Now we have been at pains to point out that
the Gautrain never was a 2010 project.
But there is good news. Fully comprehending that the train is an asset that can
add substantially to the football tournament, the Consortium is doing what it
can to come to the party. The first section of the rail link, between Sandton
and the OR Tambo international airport, is in fact scheduled to be open just 3 days before the World Cup kicks
off. That's pretty awesome.
In the podcast
interview you can listen to how we quizzed Errol Braithwaite on what the
costs of cruising on the train will be. The idea is to make it compelling for
you and me to ride the train instead of taking a car. With plenty of tolls to
be introduced in Gauteng as of April next year - to pay for the upgrades to the
roads, at 50c per km on any National road - pricing is said to be suitably
encouraging. However, the price will be loaded on that Sandton/Airport link, at
about R80 per leg (Errol tells us that this sort of distance would normally be
about R20).
A bit expensive, perhaps. But think about
this: you will make it from Sandton to the airport in just 15 minutes. Stress
free. While you listen to an iPod or catch up with a newspaper. That, friends,
is worth 80 bucks in my book.
That's not all. A lot of thought has gone
into the train, so the airport one will have space for your luggage, too. Even
the nose of the train, so the Bombela lead project manager told us, has been
designed specifically for our country. The idea, he said, was to convey a look
of speed.
So that those poor schmucks still stuck in
the traffic realize that they should have ridden the Gautrain instead.