A tender for the study is due to be issued this year, department deputy director-general for integrated transport planning Mawethu Vilana said on Wednesday (29 April).
High-speed trains require a wider gauge than the narrow gauge used throughout the country. The Gautrain is SA's only standard-gauge railway.
"The future of rail is high speed," Vilana said. In the "intermediate" term, the focus of the government, through state-owned commuter rail company the Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa), was on getting "higher speeds" of between 140km/h and 160km/h on the existing narrow-gauge infrastructure.
"Certainly, in future we need to move to high-speed, standard-gauge rail," said Prasa's strategic network planning general manager Hishaam Emeran.
For high-speed rail to succeed it must offer a "competitive journey time of about four hours over distances of between 800 and 1,000km," Emeran said, as this would allow trains to start to competing with airlines.
Emeran said that in the discussions on high-speed trains, the Durban-to-Johannesburg route features strongly, adding that a high-speed train from Cape Town-to-Johannesburg was also being mooted.
"The distance is a bit far (unless) one starts building key intermediate stops such as at Kimberley or Bloemfontein so those regions can be serviced. Then it's a different picture." Emeran said..
There was also huge demand for a train service from Polokwane to Gauteng. "The feasibility studies will indicate where a high speed train service is most necessary," he said.
SA has been flirting with the idea of high-speed trains for the past few years. Most recently the idea of a train hurtling between Johannesburg and Durban enjoyed some attention at a conference in Midrand in January, when Japan International Consultants said it had estimated the construction cost of a line between the two cities at about R160bn.
According to Emeran, the Durban-to-Johannesburg route was a "medium- to long-term plan" while the Johannesburg-to-Cape Town service was a "low priority".
Source: Business Day via I-Net Bridge
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