How safe and reliable is the Pride of Africa?

Question

I found another interesting railway. It is called the Pride of Africa and runs from Cape Town to Daressalam. I think it would be really interesting to try this once, but I can't find any information about the reliability and the safety concerning this train.

So my questions are actually:

1) How reliable is this train? Are the chances high that it has massive delays? Does it follow any time schedule?

2) Where can I find the time schedule for this train?

3) Is the train safe? Or are there a lot of incidents? For example depths or robberies?

Answer 1

You can find the schedules on the webpage of Rovos, the company running this train.

On such a trip I would not worry that much about timeliness. The train stops plenty of times on the road for sightseeing. If ever it is late there should be room to catch up the delays. This is also stated in the Journey Information.

As far as safety is concerned, you can be sure that the petty crooks you worry about won't be able to get on board. As a regular passenger they won't because the price is way too prohibitive for them and I do not know how they would do as stowaways ... Okay, the staff might steal, but that risk also exists in hotels. This risk should be smaller on the train, as they will have much more trouble to hide the stolen goods ...

Anyway, for the money it costs, one can assume that the trip is well planned and organized and that you should not care about schedules. Moreover, you can assume that the company will do an awful lot for their customers' safety.

Answer 2

I don't know much about trains in South Africa but as I can see from my short Google research, Pride of Africa seems like a luxury train and is therefore quite (or better say, extremely) expensive. There are two routes/tours available at Classic Train Travel website:

1. The Namibian Explorer - a 14 day journey from Pretoria to Cape Town via Zambia, Zimbabwe and Namibia. Depending on which way you wanted to travel, departure dates were either January 10 or January 19 2012. There are several classes, with the cheapest going for $12,995 and a Royal Suite for $23,995, both twin cabins. Single cabins are obviously more expensive. Not sure but the same route will probably be operational in January 2014.

2. Cape to Cairo - quite a long journey from Cape town to Cairo as the name suggests. It's 34 days and costs from $45,995 to $81,595, with the same conditions as above. Its departure date is January 11 2013.

You can see complete itineraries by visiting the link above.

It seems like an interesting train ride but it's a bit too expensive for my taste. But I'm sure it is an unforgettable experience...