April 27, 2004
Windhoek to Upington
Trans-Namib Railway Business Class
Train 9966 Car 85327 Seat 105
710p-930p

Train travel in Africa is, as in most of the Third World, the slowest means of getting from one place to another. Airplanes are the fastest, followed by busses, then trains and finally horse drawn carts or carriages. The cost of transport is commensurate with the speed of getting there.

For example, between Swakopmund and Windhoek, the plane costs $67.00 USD. It makes the trip in one hour. The bus takes five hours and costs $16.00. The train takes eleven hours and costs $10.00. I was traveling down to the South African border town of Upington, located just across from southern Namibia on the mighty Orange River. Service to Upington operates only twice a week, via Keetmanshoop. At just over 600 miles in length, it is the longest route served by Namibia’s national railway. The journey from Windhoek to Upington will take twenty five hours and my Business Class ticket will cost just $26.00. By contrast, two months ago I paid about the same amount for a roundtrip ticket on the commuter train from Reading into London, a ride of about one and a half hours each way.

Passenger rail services within Namibia are operated by StarLine, a division of Trans-Namib, the national railroad. Business and Economy Class travel are available on all routes. In addition, Economy Sleeper service is available on the Windhoek to Keetmanshoop route.

Interestingly, Economy and a Business Class sections are offered in each car rather than having their own dedicated cars. A service area with a toilet, vending machine and equipment for the TV/video separates the two sections. Seating in Economy Class is in a 2-2 configuration, much like you’d find on a bus. The Business Class section has just twelve seats, also arranged 2-2. Business Class seats are larger and offer greater recline and leg room than those in Economy, but they are only marginally more comfortable.

Economy Sleeper is exactly that. Six bunks in a compartment, three to a side. Passengers must provide their own bedding. From what I could see through the open windows, the bunks looked like narrow, thinly padded platforms. Unlike South African trains, there were no two or four berth cabins available.

The only food available on these Namibian trains is in the mid-car vending machines. The machines offer nothing but soda and junk food. Honestly, it was a dismal selection – chips, candy, cigarettes, biltong (a local jerky) and five different sodas. An LCD readout on the machine indicated the temperature of the sodas: 13 degrees Celsius. Cool, but not cold. The machines accepted only Namibian one dollar coins so it was important to have plenty of change. Better yet, try and bring your own food.

Had I been better prepared, I would have brought fixings for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. None of those ingredients need to be refrigerated. With a twenty five hour trip ahead of me and no means of keeping food cold, my primary concern was the possibility of food spoilage or, more specifically, salmonella poisoning.

Outside the station, a man was selling a variety of hot sausages from a large covered wagon. He had bratwurst, Russian and Polish sausages. I ordered a Russian sausage sandwich and received a large spicy sausage in a bun with sautéed onions. Four or five different sauces were available, including French mustard. This was quite a nice surprise in light of the other food options available to me. A small takeaway place a couple of blocks from the Windhoek station sold broiled chicken quarters along with egg and chicken salad sandwiches. I bought four bottles of purified water and a bag of peanuts.

Although departure time was listed as 7:10pm, the train was available for boarding from 6:00pm onward. When I boarded at about 6:45pm, there was already a movie playing on the big 19” television mounted at the front of the Business Class cabin. No checked baggage is available although the shelves above the seats provide plenty of room for most everything from bales of hay to small animals to big backpacks like mine. I was the only person in Business Class.

The service down to Keetmanshoop and Upington is operated as a “Mixed Freight”. In front of the three passenger cars were five or six box cars. Behind them were a number of flatbed cars, most of which were carrying what looked to be pipes. Everything was covered by tarps.

The 7:10pm departure time came and went. We still weren’t even connected to an engine yet. When the engine finally did show up, it arrived with a bang. Literally. It didn’t connect to the train so much as run into it. I was sitting there watching some lamentably poor Chinese action movie when suddenly there was a mighty jolt. If I’d had a bottle of soda on the seat back table, it most certainly would have tipped over or fallen off! We then went forward a couple of hundred yards, then reversed and run into or coupled with a couple of more cars. It was hard to tell. By the time we finally did get under way, it was almost 8:00pm.