How safe and reliable is the Pride of Africa?

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?

trains south-africa

Best Answer

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:

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.
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...