The Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa’s (PRASA’s) new war room will be fully operational from August 12, Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula promised on Thursday.

In officiating the launch of the war room, which was based in Johannesburg, he explained that it was a physical space that would enable those deployed to the war room to make rapid decisions based on the information they gather from the operations on the ground, on an hourly basis.

Screens in the war room reflect metrics that the technical team will use to track and measure daily performance.

The war room will focus on three areas, the first of which is service recovery, which will pay particular attention to rolling stock availability and reliability, infrastructure availability and the reliability of trains and their performance.

As part of the service recovery intervention, the war room will direct its efforts towards the realisation of set targets by December 31. These include improving the on-time performance of Metrorail to 85%; improving the on-time arrivals of Shosholoza Meyl to above 50%, from the current 3%; and ensuring Metrorail train set availability is at 291 train sets.

The second focus area is safety management. Particular attention will be paid to implementing effective measures to protect rolling stock, staging yards, perway, electrical and signalling infrastructure, depots, stations and passengers.

The third focus area is on the accelerated implementation of the Modernisation Programme, which entails creating capacity for PRASA to manage capital projects and spend its capital budget to achieve effective sequencing of critical infrastructure that will enable the deployment of the new trains in targeted corridors.

As a build-up to the launch, members of the media on Thursday visited the Germiston signal cabin, based at the Elsburg station, which PRASA said embodied the challenges it faced in controlling train movement using outdated technology, prone to human error owing to chronic cable theft that affected the daily movement of trains.

PRASA’s Gauteng Nerve Centre, in Tembisa, will enable PRASA to monitor the entirety of the Gauteng network from one location and enable rapid response when challenges in the network arise.

PRASA plans to have 80% of its 98 signal cabins in Gauteng migrated to the Nerve Centre by June 2020.