Our rail authorities are now frantically busy trying to restore rail infrastructure massively damaged and vandalised during the Covid-19 lockdown, especially on the lines serving the poor.
It is unbelievably shocking to see to what extent vandals went to steal, damage and destroy pylons and overhead powerlines, fences, station buildings and even rails.
It will cost billions of rand to restore them for a proper service to resume, sadly not in the foreseeable future.
Our government presently has to fight a deadly pandemic at great cost to save lives, and we are unfortunately already in debt as far as necessities such as housing, education, safety and security, health care etc are concerned.
There is fortunately a simple solution for the damage and destruction of power supply to locomotives and motor coaches.
The pylons and poles holding up the power lines for the trains to move are rusted due to non-maintenance and are a major danger to people, as one can see when driving around; poles were sawn off, others simply pushed over and are now lying all over the place, wires and cables were cut off, everything sold to scrapyards.
Many countries with massive rail infrastructure have for many years invested in electrified third rails alongside one of the two rails on which trains run to feed electricity for traction.
The question is why do our rail authorities in this day and age still waste further much-needed capital to replace everything instead of starting to install third rails on, for instance, the lines serving Mitchells Plain, Khayelitsha and others, where most of the damage occurred, as a start?
Imagine all the hundreds of thousands of these unsightly poles all over the country taken down, since ours is one of the largest rail networks on the continent.
They could then be sold as scrap. There must be a way our innovative engineers could come up with to implement such a plan which will save money, maintenance costs and lives.
Already diesel locomotives are being used to pull commuter trains in Gauteng, which is very costly and definitely not a long-term solution.
* Koert Meyer, Welgelegen.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Cape Argus
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