{"id":241911,"date":"2022-11-03T14:38:56","date_gmt":"2022-11-03T12:38:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/waiting-for-the-scrapheap-shosholoza-meyls-hundreds-of-rusted-carriages-to-be-scrapped-and-sold\/"},"modified":"2022-11-03T14:38:56","modified_gmt":"2022-11-03T12:38:56","slug":"waiting-for-the-scrapheap-hundreds-of-shosholoza-meyls-rusted-carriages-to-be-scrapped-and-sold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/waiting-for-the-scrapheap-hundreds-of-shosholoza-meyls-rusted-carriages-to-be-scrapped-and-sold\/","title":{"rendered":"Waiting for the scrapheap: hundreds of Shosholoza Meyl\u2019s rusted carriages to be scrapped and sold"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"article_body\">\n<p><a class=\"bigger-image\" href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/media\/uploads\/images\/photographers\/ezekiel_kekana\/bosman_rusted_carriages_3.jpeg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/waiting-for-the-scrapheap-hundreds-of-shosholoza-meyls-rusted-carriages-to-be-scrapped-and-sold.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"caption\">Shosholoza Meyl carriages left to rust at Pretoria\u2019s Bosman Street station. Photo: Ezekiel Kekana<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>PRASA says 396 Shosholoza Meyl train carriages nationally will be scrapped and sold.<\/li>\n<li>155 carriages have been parked for years in Pretoria\u2019s Bosman Street station and are \u201cobsolete.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>A \u201cretirement\u201d strategy has been approved to dispose of all the obsolete assets of PRASA.<\/li>\n<li>Only two Shosholoza Meyl routes are currently operating.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA) says 396 Shosholoza Meyl carriages, most of its fleet, are \u201cobsolete\u201d and will soon be scrapped or sold.<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt class=\"leave\" height=\"1\" id=\"gu_counter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/waiting-for-the-scrapheap-hundreds-of-shosholoza-meyls-rusted-carriages-to-be-scrapped-and-sold.gif\" width=\"1\"><\/p>\n<p>At Pretoria\u2019s Bosman Street station alone, there are 155 carriages rusting on the sidings, some for over a decade according to satellite photos.<\/p>\n<p>PRASA told GroundUp that there are \u201cover 600 carriages\u201d for Shosholoza Meyl trains across the country.<\/p>\n<p>295 coaches \u201cwill undergo general overhaul\u201d over the course of the next five years, and 22 coaches will be refurbished in the current financial year &#8211; the rest will be sent to the scrapyard. PRASA said that the Bosman Street station carriages were among the 295 carriages nationally that would be scrapped and sold.<\/p>\n<p>Shosholoza Meyl, which handles PRASA\u2019s long distance train services, has had its trains out of service in Gauteng and the Western Cape yards since February 2020, when it was shut down on the Railway Safety Regulator\u2019s instructions after <a href=\"https:\/\/www.news24.com\/news24\/southafrica\/news\/speeding-shosholoza-meyl-stopped-in-its-tracks-following-fatal-crash-20200219\">a fatal crash<\/a> outside Johannesburg.<\/p>\n<p>It has only recently resumed limited operations on two routes &#8211; Johannesburg to East London, and Johannesburg to Musina in Limpopo province.<\/p>\n<p>GroundUp visited the carriages at Pretoria Bosman station. The doors and some of the windows of the carriages have been vandalized and missing. The upper parts of the carriages are covered in rust.<\/p>\n<p>The obsolete carriages take up most of the space in the yard\u2019s staging area. Many of the carriages have been pillaged for parts by thieves.<\/p>\n<p>But these rusting hulks should soon leave their purgatory at the station sidings.<\/p>\n<p>PRASA\u2019s spokesperson Andiswa Makanda told GroundUp that the rail agency \u201chas approved a retirement strategy for 2022\/23 and a scrapping contract has been awarded that will assist in the disposal of obsolete assets\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Makanda said that PRASA could not share their scrapping strategy because it is an \u201cinternal document\u201d, but confirmed that it is \u201ccurrently in implementation\u201d. She said that a company would be appointed \u201cto assist with scrapping in a very safe manner and so our yards allow for storage.\u201d She did not say when it would start.<\/p>\n<p>PRASA says the lifespan of its train carriages is about 40 years, with each carriage undergoing a general maintenance overhaul after each \u201cnine to ten years\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>However, the state-owned rail agency admitted that \u201cmajority of our fleet will undergo heavy maintenance general-overhaul while some of our coaches are obsolete in terms of the technologies fitted on them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>We have previously reported on how <a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/prasa-leaves-stations-to-ruin-pretoria\/\">railway infrastructure<\/a> has been vandalized during the lockdown of 2020 which has disrupted many of PRASA\u2019s operations including the local-to-local trains operation.<\/p>\n<p>Makanda said PRASA intends to continue operating the Shosholoza Meyl service as it forms part of \u201cPRASA\u2019s primary mandate\u201d. The service would \u201cprogressively resume\u201d operations as infrastructure improves, but Makanda did not provide further details.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cShololoza is currently experiencing delays as a result of the vandalized infrastructure. The railway infrastructure rebuilding process is currently underway from both PRASA and Transnet Freight Rail,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"article_copyright\">\n<p>\u00a9 2022 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nd\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.<\/p>\n<p>We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, <b>not tracking<\/b> users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/waiting-for-the-scrapheap-hundreds-of-shosholoza-meyls-rusted-carriages-to-be-scrapped-and-sold.jpg\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/\">Source: GroundUp<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Shosholoza Meyl carriages left to rust at Pretoria\u2019s Bosman Street station. Photo: Ezekiel Kekana PRASA says 396 Shosholoza Meyl train carriages nationally will be scrapped and sold. 155 carriages have been parked for years in Pretoria\u2019s Bosman Street station and are \u201cobsolete.\u201d A \u201cretirement\u201d strategy has been approved to dispose of all the obsolete assets [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":241912,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9928],"tags":[28001],"class_list":{"0":"post-241911","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-groundup","8":"tag-groundup","9":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/waiting-for-the-scrapheap-hundreds-of-shosholoza-meyls-rusted-carriages-to-be-scrapped-and-sold.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241911\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}