A total of 96 railcars are needed for the Gautrain railway. Of those, 15 railcars are being built and shipped from the UK to Durban. From there they will make their way to Midrand for quality and safety checks. They even have a specially built test track for their test runs.

Once happy with that, a further 81 railcars will be built locally as part of the jobs creation initiative (estimated at an additional 93 000 jobs).

Once completed the Gautrain is expected to be an 80km railway running between Johannesburg, Pretoria and OR Tambo International Airport. Early estimates put the number of daily commuters on the Gautrain at 100 000, which should be a huge relief to road traffic in the area.

The Gautrain is estimated to take around 40 minutes to travel between Johannesburg and Pretoria (reaching speeds of 160 km per hour.)

The 10 stations that the Guatrain will stop at are:

Johannesburg Park Station - (underground station)
Rosebank - (underground station)
Sandton - (underground station)
Marlboro
Midrand
Centurion
Pretoria
Hatfield
Rhodesfield
OR Tambo International Airport

The fares are yet to be confirmed, but will be more than the current railway prices but apparently less than the cost of travelling by car.

So when can we start enjoying this speedy train? Well with a rather large incentive to open in time for the 2010 World Cup, it’s not long now.

All that’s left is linking up all the major cities in the country, helping us to enjoy local travel across the country.

(Image: Shine 2010 - 2010 World Cup good news' . Creative Commons License. Some rights reserved)