The Blue Train
node · earth · Gauteng to Western Cape
A South African luxury service between Pretoria and Cape Town, about 1,600 km on 1,067 mm Cape gauge, scheduled at roughly 27 to 30 hours across two nights. Its ancestry is the Union Limited and Union Express of 1923, boat trains timed to the mail steamers at Cape Town — this was a service built to catch a ship, not to admire the Karoo. Steel carriages painted blue arrived in 1937, air-conditioned Metro-Cammell stock in 1939, and after wartime withdrawal in 1942 the service returned in 1946 under the nickname passengers had already given it. It was suspended in February 2022 over safety concerns raised on the network it runs across, and commercial schedules for 2025–26 show it running again, with the Pretoria-end departure moved to Irene.
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- Track gauge as a colonial decisionconstrained_by
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