Luxury route
The Blue Train
Pretoria → Cape Town · South Africa
- Distance
- 1,600 km
- Fastest time
- ≈ 31 h
- Average speed
- 52 km/h
- Top speed
- 90 km/h
- Operator
- Transnet
- Train
- Luxury sleeper stock
- Countries
- South Africa
- In service since
- 1946
- Runs
- ≈ weekly, selected departure dates
Figures are published values, not live data · corrections log
A five-star hotel on rails: butlers, marble bathrooms and the Karoo semi-desert rolling past for 1,600 km.
South Africa’s grandest train has carried royalty and presidents since the steam era, and the rituals barely change: high tea as Highveld mine dumps give way to grassland, jacket-and-tie dinners, suites turned down with Egyptian cotton by nightfall. Southbound guests step off at Kimberley’s Big Hole diamond diggings, then wake to ostrich country and the long descent of the Hex River Pass, where vineyards pour down toward Cape Town and Table Mountain finally fills the window.
How this line was checked
- The 1518 km this route shares with OpenStreetMap relation 950176 is drawn from that relation's own nodes, thinned to within 37 m of them
- Checked against OpenStreetMap: 98.8% of this line lies within 250 m of real track (median 8 m); the longest stretch away from it is 7 km
- The operator publishes this line's timetable: the railway’s own site — a place to look it up, not a check of our drawing
- Wikipedia has an article for this line
Along the way
- Highveld gold country
- Kimberley’s Big Hole stop
- Matjiesfontein’s Victorian outpost
- Hex River Pass vineyards
- Table Mountain finale
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