RAIL HUB · CAPE TOWN
Cape Town’s most important rail corridor — dead since 2019, rebuilt for R1.3 billion — is running again to Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain. Now the city itself has approved a plan to take the whole Metrorail network over from the national operator by 2028.
The Central Line once carried 420,000 commuters a day between the Cape Flats and the CBD. It died in 2019 — cable theft, vandalism, and thousands of households occupying the reserve itself. The rebuild required Operation Bhekela (temporary works to run trains around settlements) and a formal relocation program for 5,195 households across Langa, Philippi and Khayelitsha.
Service resumed in stages: Philippi–Nolungile in late 2024, Khayelitsha in April 2025 at reduced capacity, the Mitchells Plain branch through 2025. Two trains an hour today, six planned. The fleet is new — Gibela-built Isitimela Sabantu EMUs — and PRASA’s August 2025 fare increase, the first in ten years, funds the security layer that keeps the recovery alive.
In December 2025 the city council approved the Rail Business Plan: Cape Town asks the National Department of Transport to hand Metrorail operations to the municipality — with private-sector concessions for efficiency — arguing that the city’s trains should be planned with the city’s buses. National Treasury funding is the gating item; the city targets completion by 2028.
If it lands, Cape Town becomes the first South African metro to run its own rail — and the template for a national devolution debate. The plan already sketches a new link to Blue Downs. For visitors today, the practical rail fact remains the Southern Line to Simon’s Town — scenic, cheap, and the one corridor that never fully died.
The TIO read: Cape Town’s rail story just flipped from recovery to reform. The Central Line’s return is the hard part already done; devolution is the governance bet that could make it durable. Watch Treasury’s funding answer in 2026 — that is the real timetable.
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