Rovos Rail is not a company in the way most luxury travel businesses are companies. It is a passion expressed in rolling stock. Rohan Vos began acquiring and restoring vintage railway carriages in the 1980s as a personal project, a way of preserving the magnificent coaches of southern Africa’s golden age of rail, which were being scrapped as the continent’s railway networks contracted, and what began as a collector’s obsession has become, over forty years, the finest privately operated luxury train in the world.
The carriages are authentic: Victorian-era coaches converted from their original purposes, or early twentieth-century sleeping cars built for the Union Limited and other prestigious services of the British Empire railway era, each restored with extraordinary fidelity to its period character. Teak panelling, brass fittings, original windows modified for air conditioning and safety, and private en-suite bathrooms where the original wagon-lits washbasins once stood. The Royal Suites, 16 square metres of private compartment with a full-sized bed, couch, bathroom, and windows on three sides, represent a standard of space and privacy that no comparable train can match.
The observation car, attached to the rear of the train, is the feature that most consistently stops passengers in their tracks: an outdoor platform at the tail where guests stand and watch the African landscape recede behind them, unobstructed by glass, close enough to the track to feel the heat and hear the sound of the Karoo, with nothing between them and the continent. In the early morning, when the air is cold and the flat topped hills of the Karoo catch the first horizontal light, it is the kind of vantage point that no other train in the world provides.
The dining car operates on a formal table setting basis that is entirely appropriate to the Victorian railway tradition from which it descends. Three courses for dinner, served with a selection from South Africa’s finest wine regions, at tables set for groups that form and reform as the two-day journey progresses. The conversations that develop on Rovos Rail have a quality distinctive to this mode of travel: the enforced intimacy of a small moving world, without phones or internet, creates a social atmosphere that most travellers describe as one of the journey’s unexpected pleasures.
Off-train excursions are included at selected stops: Kimberley’s diamond mines, Matjiesfontein’s extraordinary time-capsule of Victorian colonial culture, the Cape Winelands at the end of the journey. But the train itself is the destination: the sound of the steam engine (on heritage sections), the rhythm of the tracks, the slow revelation of a continent through plate glass and open air.
The Cape to Cairo route (15 days through Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, and Kenya) is the journey to plan toward. It has very few rivals in any form of travel.
