Toeing line for a cause

On Saturday, I caught a train from Paris to Barcelona.

- Ben Trovato

A screen at the end of the carriage kept track of our speed. At one point, we hit 298km/h. Apart from the time a police dog chased me in Umbilo, it was the fastest I'd ever gone on land. Nobody else seemed as excited as I was. They stared at their phones or nodded off in their comfy seats.

I was transfixed, silently urging the bullet-nosed beast to go faster. Just two kilometers an hour more! Inexplicably, the perverse driver kept it at 298. I certainly would have taken it to 300 if I were behind the wheel. But then I'd push it to 310 and 320 and wouldn't stop until the passengers were screaming and soiling themselves while the train came perilously close to leaving the rails and smashing through a village on the outskirts of Perpignan.

Imagine if we had a train like that. Joburg to Durban in under two hours. Or Cape Town in four and a bit. Imagine the carnage when it came around a corner and one of the tracks had been stolen. Or a head-on with an oncoming train because the signaling equipment had been vandalized. We just can't have nice things.

There were even police officers on the train. For a while, anyway. Just long enough to escort a couple of black passengers off. Probably not because they were black, although you never can tell with the French, but more likely because when the cops asked to see their papers, they couldn't produce much more than a box of Rizlas between them.