Metrorail, or more aptly Metrofail, is the most amazing company that has me holding it in awe every day.
There are certain elements that demonstrate the amazing features of this state enterprise, and if there are those who cannot see the state it is in, then perhaps it should be brought to their attention.
The most amazing fact is that the platform station heights differ from station to station – some trains are low, some trains are high, but the actual height differs from station to station, and dates back to the original state enterprise known as the South African Railway Services, far and away the most racist of the previous regime's enterprises.
Unfortunately the wrong direction was followed post-independence, and now many years later the Metrofail staff will still insist on asking if one wants a “first class or third class ticket”, and if they are correctly informed that it is “Metro and Metro Plus”, their amazing answer keeps me further in awe: “It is what the people call it”.
Many years ago all those carriages should have become one excellent class of travel, but now radical new management is needed.
The South African Railways Services set the precedent for Metrofail, and in the dying years before independence, the previous order showed the new order the amazing profits to be made if you transport 700 000 people a day.
A further amazing feature of Metrofail that is endured by those 700 000 people a day is that the trains only have capacity for 200 000. The other 500 000 have to squeeze aboard. Based on the rush hour trains in and out of Cape Town central, a conservative estimate is that the trains are overloaded by at least 70% of rated passenger capacity.
Metrofail is their own law, so no one can hold them accountable for overloading, and you will never see an inspector on the trains in rush hour, nor a traffic cop stopping the train and asking for the driver’s licence and how many passengers there are on board; so they just continue stuffing the people in, and they stop at every uneven platform they can find to stuff even more people in.
Another most amazing feature of Metrofail is its large and crumbling infrastructure and all the very, very lucrative looting that has been taking place since about 1989, when the apartheid regime had to relinquish control of this massive, highly lucrative entity they had created. Most of the railway houses were given to their preferred Afrikaner staff, and an audit of these times will lead us to understand why the current management is so corrupt and incompetent.
You must also remember that these poor Afrikaners who joined the South African Railway Services required no qualifications other than a complete disrespect for the paying passengers; but that was merely the attitude of their management, as they operated trains with three classes of carriages – hence third class has continued to be an integral part of the day-to-day running of this operation.
The abandoned buildings, hundreds of torched trains and thousands of residents on railway property for many years leads to the amazing conclusion that the systematic looting of this critical needed form of public transport, that was designed to bring the work force to the areas of the settlers, has not changed in any way, as the poor workers board these derelict trains every day to get to the work place, but if they are late it is accepted that it was Metrofail’s failure, and their pay is honestly docked. And to complete the amazing features of our Passenger Rail Association of South Africa, you are allowed to litter, as there are no litter bins on our carriages.
So regardless if you are in first class or third class, you will at times be forced to stand, and you may just throw your empty packet on the floor or out the window: this is the way the system was designed by the Architects of Class Confusion.