The Old North-South Road
Sandy Grant | Wednesday July 26, 2017 12:41
And who wants to know about yesterday? The fact is that for a few, these changes are of great interest. Look at this old map, for instance, and note how closely the road hugs the railway line, almost as if they were close relatives.
Where the road crossed the railway line, it maintained close contact. Today it is a very different matter. The road acts as if it doesn’t even know the railway. It is all too aware that it is the more dominant of the two and prefers to keep it at a distance.
And when, twice today, at Gaborone and Serule, it needs to cross the line, compared with the four times in the past, it remains aloof, sweeping over it and barely willing even to acknowledge the existence of anything below. Of course, in the past, road and rail were closely interlinked.
Travel by train was a routine for nearly everyone. The mixed good train stopped at all the 52 stops between Vakaranga in the north and Ramatlabama in the south with the mixed travelling onwards to Bulawayo and Mahikeng, whilst the mail continued further south to Cape Town and Johannesburg. For passengers to reach those trains, it was obvious that the road system had to align itself with that of the rail.
The railway stations provided the obvious connecting point between the two. Even before the rail passenger service was terminated in 2009 – was it really so short a time ago? – the newly aligned north-south main road had decisively parted company with its co-transporter, most notably in respect of Ramotswa, Mochudi and Palapye.
No longer did the main Gaborone-Kgale road pass through Taung. Indeed the parting of ways was so comprehensive that the new Morwa– Pilane road didn’t even bother about going to the station. It passed it by. As a result, Rampa was obliged to either re-site his filling station or lose his business. The few buildings at the old station complex were therefore left beleaguered and irrelevant.
Even more reflective of the parting of ways, however, was the displacement of the old Morwa-Pilane section of the old national road by the newly aligned A1. Much the same happened at Palapye where the railway station complex, which was considerably larger than the one at Pilane, was left as an historical backwater.
If Rampa at Pilane was able to adapt to the new road system, the same could not be said of the old Palapye Hotel at the railway station – whose postal address is still, tellingly, Box 1, Palapye. Unlike filling stations, hotels cannot be picked up and placed on a new site.
The Palapye Hotel was one of a number up and down the country which served, and was dependent on, the mail and mixed goods trains. The realignment of the A1 together with the termination of passenger trains left all of them, together with the associated stores, high and dry. Were they ever compensated?