Randolph Gautrain: also dubbed “The Shilowa Express” by the man who masterminded this massive project (and quite honestly, I prefer this name).
The Gauteng Department of Pothole Filling and Train Tossing is breaking ground in the next week or so in a R100 million-a-week project to link Park Station in the Johannesburg CBD, with Pretoria and Johannesburg International Airport in the north and east respectively, taking a detour through Rosebank, Sandton, Marlboro and Centurion. For those who don’t know, Gauteng is over 17 000 square kilometres in size.
The good news is that the station for Centurion is literally in spitting distance from my office. The bad news is that I would have to drive for around an hour in the morning through heavy traffic (“rush hour” is such a misnomer) to get to the station closest to my house.
The other bad news is that it will take about four years to build the damn thing, at which point my teaching degree would be complete and I’d be leaving here to teach.
A word of advice, though. If you can help it, avoid Oxford Street in Rosebank, and Rivonia Road in Sandton, for the next four years. Traffic, already a nightmare, will be equivalent to hell.