We’d be loco to let them go

IAM back from the Garden Route where people in the tourist business still hope that the steam railway from George to Knysna will run again one day.

We have some of the most beautiful — and lightly used — railways in the world. Until it was damaged by severe floods in 2006, the Knysna line was the country’s official tourist railway. Since then, much hot air has emanated from various tourism officials and state departments on the future of this once major regional tourist attraction.

Proposals to operate a service on an undamaged part of the line have come to nothing and today, eight years on, locals despair that trains will ever run again.

Tourist railways — even those off the beaten track — can draw large numbers of tourists. More than 1.1 million people ride the steam trains on the HSB, a network of narrow-gauge lines in Germany’s Harz Mountains, every year. Some 200 000 people trek to Durango in Colorado to ride the Silverton train to an old silver mining settlement in the San Juan Mountains.

“Whether in the summer holidays or winter, whether on Sundays or in the middle of the week — get on board and find Germany’s most popular mountain range in the historic steam train!” the HSB website says. Compare that to the George-Knysna line, which even at its peak was hamstrung by bureaucratic obstinacy: trains — in a major tourist region — never ran on Sundays.

That kind of thing is easily fixed. More difficult is the fact that while there are a number of closed branch lines with good tourist potential, Transnet, which owns them all, has yet to make any progress on its 2010 proposal to concession them.

A number of local rail and tourism operators threw their hats in the ring when Transnet asked for expressions of interest. Since then, nothing has happened, save that some of the lines on the list have been preyed-on by scrap thieves and the cost of repairing them would make any tourist operation unviable from the start.

Rail tourism brings visitors and jobs. Better yet, the business and technical skills to operate a tourist railway already exist in the tourism industry and in the handful of steam clubs that operate the country’s remaining steam locomotives. All they need is the opportunity to try and make it work.

Transnet and the national and provincial tourism ministries could use this advice from media mogul Ted Turner: “Do something. Either lead, follow or get out of the way.”

Ash is the deputy editor of Travel Weekly