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Train travel. You see it in novels and movies. What a romantic lure, riding with the wind blowing through your hair and strange and weird landscapes slipping by you as you cool to a chilled fruit cocktail.

Inspired by the freight-jumping episodes of American author Jack Kerouac I decided my time had come to take to the rails of South Africa. When a rock concert descended on Pretoria I knew this was it. But it was too late to get a ticket and while a friend of mine John hopped on, I ended up having to drive up. When a few days later I caught up with John I discovered how lucky I was not to have stepped aboard.

He told me how the train’s coaches had accidentally come unhooked in the middle of the night somewhere out in the Karoo and taken a somewhat inebriated passenger with it when he’d fallen through on to the tracks. But all the talk of brain hemridges and ambulances with blaring sirens racing to the middle of nowhere didn’t seem to deter me one bit. After all John was the type prone to over-dramatizing things and anyway was supposedly under the influence himself at the time this all took place.

So it was barely three months later when I found myself aboard this same train heading for Johannesburg. And why not, at R320.00 for a second-class ticket it was the cheapest way to travel except of course if you wanted to hitch and I was sure as hell not going to end up stuck with some guy called Norman for twelve hours as we headed through the deathly dry Karoo. But as yet unknown to me, the rail trip would turn into a 36-hour nightmare of gunshot wounds, crowded passageways and escaping criminals.

Ensuring I got to the Cape Town station half an hour before the departure time I arrived only to converge on a panic-stricken scene of chaos and confusion. It was a Saturday, just four days before Christmas and the whole world was there. People were moving up and down the platform with suitcases and boxes yelling uncontrollably at one another and trying to push over-sized luggage into a by now overcrowded train.

Already an hour late the train edged away from Cape Town, yet everything was pretty calm as we stopped to pick up more passengers at the Boland stations of Paarl and Worcester. Now inside the compartment which I shared with five others the heat was becoming unbearable. It was mid-summer and well over 30 degrees inside the crammed train as we moved further into the steamy interior. The drinks had already began to flow when one passenger ripped open shot-size brandy bottles and passed it round our compartment.

Before long, the heat still upon us, we were shooting through a 13,5km-long tunnel that wound under the Hex River Mountains. Yet no sooner had the train emerged from the blackness than we stumbled onto a harsh and wrathful scene like something straight out of the Old Testament book of Genesis. Rain was pelting down viciously and the sky had darkened, every now and again interrupted by a powerful flash of lightning that blitzed the sky. Hail lay so thick it looked like snow and in the surrounding Karoo countryside and water was flooding everywhere, swirling menacingly around the raised tracks.

But this was nothing more than a sign of the troubles that lay ahead. Even the roar of an argument between two passengers which had been growing rowdier and rowdier had gone unnoticed or been drowned out by the flash floods, debauchery and general yelping around us, until all of a sudden the train ground to an abrupt halt.

“Did you hear that? Did you hear those shots?” spat a nervous-looking passenger who’d earlier offered me a drink of his brandy. He like everyone else sat terror-stricken while onboard security guards ran wild around us, some even jumping from the stationary train before hauling a handcuffed man aboard.

In this melee of confusion one passenger hurried me along the passageway, offering to show me what had just happened. In a compartment two coaches down from our carriage was a steward pressing bloodstained towels around the arm of a small boy who turned out to be no more than 15-years-old.

It turned out that the gargled argument we’d earlier had to put up with was the cause of all this carnage and mayhem. It took nothing more than a R50 peak cap to invoke the rage of this gun-ho man who had pulled his revolver and fired two shots into the boys arm causing passengers in carriage No. 8 to dive for cover beneath the seats of their second class compartments.

Somehow I should’ve heeded the calls of my friend John who was at that very moment probably safely in his Cape Town digs sipping Caribbean crab cocktails and playing droughts. But instead there I was holed up in a train with a bleeding kid and a gun crazy criminal – in the middle of nowhere half an hour from Matjiesfontein – a small town with nothing more than a hotel and a few outhouses. Eventually after what seemed like an eternity (a long hour-and-a-half) we did away with the two at Laingsburg. Everyone uttered one big proverbial sigh of relief and got ready to brave the rest of the journey.

It was later, after an equally long nightmarish slog that we arrived at Beaufort West, the supposed halfway point in our trip. Being midnight the Karoo town should’ve been a quiet den of light, but instead it turned out to be alive with people. It soon became clear why. Water was everywhere, in streets in the gardens, flowing through small three-roomed houses and even through windows.

Inside the train in the safety of our compartment I, together with fellow passengers looked downcast at one man, a crane operator returning home to Beaufort West to see his mother who he hadn’t seen in two years. Then we wished him all the best as he leapt from the train just as the train’s conductor, a wily Afrikaner with a boep belly disembarked from a neighbouring door onto the platform. Right before the big man bailed off the hell ride he told me that the train, which was already six hours late, was the worst he’d ever worked on in all his 17 years in rail.

These were not gentle confiding words because we were only halfway to Jo’burg and there was plenty of time for a lot more to go wrong. Yet, except for stopping an enormous amount of times in the oddest of places and running later and later, nothing else seemed to happen. Was this it? Was this how the worst train trip in recent South African history was going to end – on a complete anti-climax?

By thinking like this I’d already cast the bad dye. You see when your trip, be it by car, train or airplane is going wrong, you can always count on something slipping in right at the end, just to remind you of what a lovely journey you had. This of course was the case. I mean we were close, so close. Johannesburg’s Parktown station was just minutes away Then it all changed. I remember sitting quietly with my two fellow passengers when suddenly we heard a clink of what sounded a lot like a few pebbles hitting the tracks.

“It was probably a rock that we hit on the tracks, people are always trying to derail the train by putting rocks on the rails,” said the guy from Brixton. “One time I was travelling and these kids, probably really bored, started stoning the train I was in,” said the other passenger. What was it is? We thought.

What it was however, turned out to be nothing short of bizarre. A Brit in the neighbouring compartment, who was travelling through South Africa and should have been in a plane heading for London right that minute, before the delay made him miss the flight, rapidly unravelled the story.

He told how a nervous and worried looking rot had entered the compartment and pleaded with him and two other passengers to take from him “his” wallet and hide it for him. But these guys knew there’d already been one shooting today and so wisely turned him down. The rot didn’t stop at this. “He then wound a jacket around his arm and jumped out the carriage window” said the Brit with an mark of utter amazement stretching across his puzzled English face. The guy must’ve been in a real hurry because he hadn’t even bothered to use the train’s door which was only a mere three metres away from the compartment window he’d sprung from.

Though the train company responded hastily to our British buddy’s calls by rescheduling his flight back home and booking him into a luxury hotel close to the airport there was no appeasement for the rest of us, no justice for our train trip out of hell. When passengers emptied out for the last time on Johannesburg station and crawled through the mountain of chip bags, paper and Coke tins that lie scattered across the platforms the train was over 10 hours late. If this wasn’t quite a record we had survived a gun crazy mad man, floods and hail and witnessed a freak jump from the carriage window of a moving train. Only in South Africa I thought to myself as I dragged my bag away wearily away from the stricken train.

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