Pretoria - Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula has assured railway commuters that his department was on track with making sure all 10 corridors of the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) were up and running come December.
Mbalula was speaking at the Pretoria Station where he launched the 2022 October Transport Month campaign, alongside the resumption of the commuter rail corridor between Pienaarspoort and Pretoria following approval by the Railway Safety Regulator (RSR).
The transport minister said his department was running a tight operation and strengthening Prasa on a daily basis to ensure that not only the commitments they made were fulfilled, but also that they rebuilt the agency (Prasa).
"It is a broken place and the journey to get it right has long begun. The work we are showcasing today is what we pronounced when the president spoke in the state of the nation. The most important thing is to meet the deadlines and once we've recovered the line how do we sustain it moving forward," he said.
Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula has assured railway commuters that his department was on track with making sure all 10 corridors of Prasa were up and running come December @PrasaRail @CityTshwane #Prasa #Mbalula @MbalulaFikile @IOL pic.twitter.com/Wsn20M0yRv
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"We sustain it with a strong backup of maintenance in all facets be it maintaining overhead traction equipment, signalling, maintaining tracks, or just a general overhaul of the trains to ensure that they are clean, serviced and whenever anything happens in terms of electricity, cutting of cables we are able to intervene."
Mbalula stressed that he was still confident that all 10 corridors would be up and operational by December, aside from the Cape Town area which he said was his department's "Achilles heel''.
According to the minister, his department was fighting hard in order to get people who had occupied and built on the tracks off the line, and on to the identified land parcels.
Working alongside the local government and the national government he said they were awaiting their commitments on the parcels of land to move the people onto.
So far he said they had made in-roads as they had managed to get the people to agree to move off the tracks, with the first group scheduled to move on November 1.
In addition to fixing the broken and dilapidated corridors, the transport department was according to the minister already working on building new stations scheduled to be complete by June 2023.
Pretoria News