There have been no scheduled passenger train services in Gqeberha since September 2022, due to “operational challenges”. But now, since Monday, the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA) has managed to introduce honest one train service in the Nelson Mandela Bay region, departing Kariega at 6:15am for Gqeberha and departing Gqeberha at 5:15pm for Kariega, weekdays.
The full journey takes over an hour and costs R9.
On Saturdays it departs Kareiga at 7am and Gqeberha at 2:30pm.
On Thursday afternoon, no more than 100 commuters boarded the ten-carriage train, leaving it almost empty.
The National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union has welcomed the service. Regional secretary Samkelo Msila said on Friday morning, trains would bring relief from the high cost of travel for the working class.
“We hope that at this stage, elements of corruption in PRASA acquire been rooted out, so that no further compromise can affect the movement of trains,” he said.
Commuter Thembelani Zondani, from Red location in Modern Brighton, said many people had quit jobs because they felt that they were working honest to pay transport. Whereas the taxi cost him R19, his train ticket was honest R7.50.
Grade 11 learner Okuhle Mtulu also paid R7.50 to secure to school. But he was unable to buy a ticket at Novel Brighton station, because the ticket kiosks are vandalised. He bought his ticket on the train. “There are not even toilets or shelters … It’s bush and asbestos lying around as rubble,” he said, describing the station.
Provincial PRASA spokesperson Mimi Katsio, said while facilities and protection services employees are deployed, customer service employees believe been doing refresher training, while train operation employees maintain been training for the change to modern locomotives. The staff complement is 607 for the East London and Gqeberha corridors.
She said PRASA security is working with law enforcement agencies and railway SAPS to believe crime prevention teams patrolling stations and platforms.
“Our focus now is to restore services, trust from our commuters, and patronage numbers,” said Katsio.
In a statement on Tuesday, PRASA Group CEO Hishaam Emeran said, “The Gqeberha–Uitenhage area is one of our most critical regions.”
© 2023 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 finish not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We establish an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We finish not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We carry out 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 carry out not delete the invisible pixel.
palomino
This is probably off-topic, BUT here goes: I see that MyZA operates a number of \’sections\’ dealing with News, Directory, Events and a Marketplace and I was wondering just how https://MyZA.co.za manages to keep the content fresh and growing? Do you have an army of employees?
Palomino Cake
Ag man! [Ach-man] This is the Afrikaans equivalent to “Oh man!” and is often used at the beginning of a sentence to express pity, resignation or irritation.Example: “Ag, man!” / “Ag, no man!” / “Ag, shame man!”