Africa's most celebrated private train began as a family holiday idea from a man who sold motor spares in the coalfields of Witbank. Rohan Vos did not set out to run a hotel on rails. He wanted a train of his own, and it was South Africa's state railways, unwilling to haul a private carriage cheaply, that suggested he sell tickets to cover the cost.
What followed was one of the more improbable rescues in railway preservation: dining cars recovered from a failed restaurant, coaches bought as scrap, a steam depot brought back from abandonment, and a business that nearly went under before it found its feet. The Pride of Africa is not a replica of a golden age. It is largely built from the golden age itself.
A motor-spares dealer with an idea in the bath
Rohan Vos was born in Cape Town in 1946, the son of a doctor at Groote Schuur Hospital. As the Sunday Times reconstructed his early life, there was no money for university, so he sold encyclopaedias and then motor spares in Witbank, eventually building a chain of spares stores and running a film-rental business on the side. None of it pointed towards railways.
The turn came in the mid-1980s. Rovos's own published history records that Rohan and his wife Anthea took up a last-minute invitation to a steam excursion in the Magaliesberg, and that a friend's enthusiasm for trains led Vos to a railway auction with the modest aim of buying a coach or two. Vos has said the larger idea arrived, of all places, in the bath: a private train in which his family could travel on holiday.
The railway that told him to sell tickets
In December 1986 Vos applied to the state railways for permission to run private rolling stock on the national network. Officials were sceptical; private trains, he was told, did not happen in South Africa. They did not refuse outright, but the access charges they quoted were far beyond what one family could justify. It was the railway's own suggestion that he recover the cost by selling places to paying passengers. The commercial train was, in effect, a workaround for a tariff.
Rovos dates its first letter of permission to 1986. It would take nearly three more years of work before a train left the yard.
Scrapyards, country clubs and a failed restaurant
The rolling stock was assembled piece by piece. The best-documented recovery concerns three South African Railways dining cars, 220 KEI, 225 NILE and 226 MODDER, which entered service between 1935 and 1938. When SAR sold them in 1983 they were moved to the grounds of the Jewish Guild club in Morningside, Sandton, to form the core of a novel restaurant. The venture failed and the cars were left vandalised and derelict. Rovos bought them in 1988 and hauled them to Witbank to be returned to the rails.
That pattern repeated for years. Coaches were sought in scrapyards, private collections and railway clubs, and in 1994 the company bought 38 redundant carriages from the railways in a single purchase, a remarkable step for a business that had been close to failure only a year earlier. Nor was the search confined to South Africa: the passenger coaches in service today include restored stock from National Railways of Zimbabwe. One account puts the total recovered and restored in the early years at around sixty carriages, a figure the company's own timeline does not break down.
Steam engines with family names
The motive power was rescued in the same spirit. The Sunday Times reported that Vos named his polished steam engines after members of his family, and the roster bears that out. It includes two Class 19D locomotives from the 1930s, 2701 Brenda and 2702 Bianca; Class 25NC engines such as 3442 Anthea, built by Henschel in Germany in 1953, and 3484 Marjorie, built by North British in Glasgow in 1954; and the veteran of the fleet, Class 6 439 Tiffany, built by Dübs and Company of Glasgow in 1893.
Bianca was rebuilt during 1987 together with the seven carriages that formed the first train. On 29 April 1989 that train left with four paying passengers, plus press and family, on a four-night journey across the highveld to Nelspruit and down the branch line to Sabie and Graskop.
Two myths worth correcting
Popular accounts tend to repeat two claims that do not hold up. The first is that the train made its maiden voyage in 1986. That was the year of the first application and permission; the first departure with passengers was in April 1989, the date the company itself uses for its anniversaries.
The second is that Tiffany is the oldest working steam locomotive in the world. An engine of 1893 is a genuine rarity in regular main-line use in Africa, but heritage railways elsewhere have operated considerably older locomotives, so the superlative should be retired. Tiffany's real distinction is more interesting: a Victorian Glasgow-built engine rebuilt to haul paying passengers more than ninety years after it was made.
Near-bankruptcy and the return to Capital Park
Vos was candid about the early economics. "We launched in April '89 and proceeded to lose money," he told the Sunday Times. By 1993, with tourism depressed in the uncertain years before the 1994 elections, the company was almost bankrupt and the bank had called him in about his overdraft. Investment from a few friends kept it alive. The same year the train reached Dar es Salaam for the first time, and in 1994 Rovos committed to extending its route from Pretoria to Victoria Falls.
- 1986 - first letter of permission to run on the national network
- 1988 - dining cars KEI, NILE and MODDER bought from the failed restaurant
- 29 April 1989 - first passenger departure, seven carriages
- April 1990 - first journey to Cape Town, over four days
- 1993 - first train into Dar es Salaam
- 1994 - purchase of 38 redundant carriages
- 1997 - lease signed on the Capital Park site in Pretoria
- 1999 - new Rovos station at Capital Park opened, marking the tenth anniversary
The move to Pretoria completed the rescue. Capital Park had been a steam locomotive depot, once home to around a hundred engines, before it fell out of use. In 1997 Transnet's property arm leased the site to Rovos; workshop equipment was moved in and construction of the station, platform and crew facilities began in 1998. The figures for its size differ between sources: the company's timeline describes 12 acres at the start growing to 60 acres, while the Sunday Times put it at 60 hectares. Either way, a derelict depot became the base from which every Rovos journey begins and ends.
Where the rescued stock runs today
The carriages recovered from scrapyards and clubhouses now form the Pride of Africa, a train whose period character comes from restored original stock rather than reproduction. Its long-established routes reach from Pretoria to Cape Town, Victoria Falls, Durban and, on its longest itineraries, Dar es Salaam and Walvis Bay on the Namibian coast.
The obvious comparison is South Africa's other luxury train, the Blue Train, a state-built service with an entirely different lineage. Our guide to Southern Africa by luxury train sets the two side by side. For the older European and American roots of the private sleeping car that Vos was, knowingly or not, reviving, see the stories of Georges Nagelmackers and George Pullman, or browse all our trains.
