David, trains are indeed holding in here, although old-timers tell me that the railway scene is not as good as it used to be. The passenger tour and charter business has suffered a bit recently as coaches and motive power are no longer so easily available from Spoornet due to their concentration on their core business of freight.
But Rovos owns its own coaches and I am told they will be running 27 trains during the month of August alone. Heritage rail associations such as Friends of the Rail (my own club, based in Pretoria) and Germiston-based Reefsteamers have their own locos and coaches and are able to run a lot of steam trains for the local and overseas markets. We've hosted overseas railfans on two occasions this year with one more group coming in September, and Reefsteamers ran a very successful steam safari earlier this year. Tour groups tend to travel round the country and spend a couple of days with each operator to experience steam operating in different environments amidst South Africa's spectacular scenery. This month we entertained a small group of hard-core railfans with a 24-hour "shed experience" where they had the opportunity to stay with us in the shed as we prepared our loco for their trip the following day. They were particularly impressed with the coaling operation - there are probably few places in the world where a steam loco is still coaled from a genuine original very large coaling stage.
And while the concentration on freight is disappointing for the passenger industry, it opens up whole new vistas for railfans, as I believe happened in the USA. We are seeing new classes of locomotive appearing in South Africa, and some impressively long and heavy trains running through beautiful scenery often on steep gradients.
