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Explore
Rovos Rail...Pride of Africa
Blue Train
This is without a doubt South Africa’s most famous train…a 5-star luxury hotel
on wheels that will take you through some of the most breathtakingly beautiful
parts of the country.
The Blue Train offers unparalleled luxury, from your very own personal butler, to
cordon bleu dining, the best South African wines on board, the finest bed linen,
marble floors, gold fittings in the bathrooms, elegant lounges, cocktails and
sundowners in the Club Car, watching the passing landscape from the luxurious
Lounge Car, and more. Meals are prepared by top chefs and presented on fine
china, and wine comes in delicate crystal.
The train is truly worthy of its claim to offer “a window to the soul of Africa” as
it travels the 1,600km between Cape Town and Pretoria in 31 hours. There are
currently two standard routes: the original Pretoria-aCape Town route, and the
Pretoria-Hoedspruit/Kruger National Park route added in 2016. The train can
also be chartered and can host on-board conferences.
The first Blue Train was launched in the 1920s, making the service almost a
century old. The idea for the train came from a desire at the time to be able to
travel from the Cape to Cairo and subsequently grew from two earlier trains,
the Union Express and the Union Limited. While it never made it to Cairo, the
train did at times travel to the misty, thundering Victoria Falls on the border
between Zambia and Zimbabwe. Sadly it no longer does so due to incompatible
infrastructure in Zimbabwe.
During World War II the train was pressed into military service, reincarnated in
1946 and has undergone several refurbishments, upgrades and modernisations
since then, also switching from steam to electric and finally to diesel.
The northbound train stops in the historic little hamlet of Matjiesfontein in the
Karoo, fittingly founded in 1884 by the legendary Scottish railwayman James
Douglas Logan. Today the hamlet still boasts a number of splendid historical
buildings and sites, including the Lord Milner Hotel while relics from the Anglo-
Boer War can still be found in the surrounding fields. The southbound train
stops in Kimberley with its diamond mining history and Big Hole, as well as
numerous other attractions. Both the stops in Matjiesfontein and Kimberley
allow time for excursions.
MZANZI TRAVEL| www.mzanzitravel.co.za|ISSUE 6 | 39