It’s a haunting sound when a train groans and grinds into the station and then settles with a sigh at the platform. More haunting when it’s the last tourist train between Johannesburg and Hoedspruit.

The train I’m talking about is the Premier Classe, a delightfully old-fashioned overnight ride as well as the most relaxing, picturesque and absolutely the cheapest way of travelling the 450km from Johannesburg to Hoedspruit with its surrounding reserves and lodges. It promises a “five star” product, and a lot of the time Premier Classe gets that right.

Even in the unlikely event Transnet wakes up fast, this pleasant and relaxed contribution to our tourism economy is about to grind to a halt. And along with it, will go train-tourism initiatives, a largely untapped niche of potential tourism interest.

Thornybush Collection CEO Nic Griffin told Business Day that it was intolerable delays in the service which would ultimately lead to the failure of the service. And he said it was Transnet who must take the blame.  “The parastatal appears to be bogged down by poor maintenance and security, lack of infrastructure investment and weak management, which is turning customers away,” said Griffin.

“We have chartered both the Premiere Classe and the Blue Train in the last four months at huge expense, but on each occasion the train has run between three and nine hours late. The overseas market simply will not support this poor service. The worst part is that nobody apologises.”

The Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa) CEO, Lucky Montana, says in an open letter in Business Day, February 9, to the DA, Shosholoza Meyl (the Prasa subsidiary which runs Premier Classe), requires about R1,4bn a year to run the business effectively, but the DoT provides only R450m. But, lest you think it is simply underfunding which has done the damage, read further on in the letter. Montana admits that the acting CEO of Shosholoza Meyl, Viwe Mlenzana, has been suspended for unauthorized expenditure and over-expenditure.

He says Sisa Mtwa, Metrorail CEO has been asked to explain his failure to manage controllable costs in Metrorail, poor train performance and the “neglect of the Tshwane Business Express Service” and to explain why disciplinary action should not be taken against him. And Metrorail Gauteng’s management team has been told to refund Prasa the money (almost R600 000 according to the DA) it spent on Women’s Day celebrations last year.

The tragedy of the decline of our rail services across the board is that all the infrastructure once was (and in many cases still is) in place. With proper maintenance it could have still been in functioning order and we would now have a decent commuter system plus a great tourism offering. I’ve been past the yards filled with rusting skeletons of rolling stock – they make you want to weep. I’ve seen the deserted stations where every sheet of roofing, every window frame, every door and every toilet has been removed. Now that the infrastructure has been allowed to rot and rust and waste away, the combination of underfunding and overspending will probably be the death blow to a once proud rail tourism service.