The Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA) Ministerial war room is said to have gotten “off to a good start”, following its first day of operation this week.

Launched by Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula last week, the war room forms part of interventions put in place to address the agency’s turnaround on the back of a continued decline in its quality of service.

According to a statement issued by the Transport department on Wednesday, the war room had already led to a slight improvement in Metrorail’s performance.

On Tuesday, 78% of scheduled train trips ran, with 53% of them running on time. These figures rose to 86% on Wednesday morning, with 73% of trains running on time so far.

The war room also detected the burning of two train carriages in Cape Town, and allowed for the matter to be attended to, with services being recovered within four hours.

The war room is supported by a technical task team primarily made up of experts with in-depth knowledge and experience in rail operations, signalling, rolling stock, security, business process, engineering and modelling.

The war room’s function is to monitor operations daily and ensure the implementation of turnaround strategies, said Transport Ministry spokesperson Ayanda Paine.

Falling in line with the war room’s service recovery focus area, it will direct its efforts towards improving on-time performance of Metrorail to 85% from 50.2%; improving the on-time arrivals of Shosholoza Meyl to above 50% from 3%; ensuring Metrorail trainset availability is as 291 trainsets from 157; improving locomotive availability of Shosholoza Meyl to 60% from below 40%; as well as achieving 100% correct configuration of trainsets, from 41%; and reducing area under speed restrictions to less than 100 km of the network.

The war room will also focus on safety management and accelerated implementation of the modernisation programme, which entails urgently 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 on targeted corridors.

The Minister’s intervention will continue until the end of the 2019/20 financial year, with defined targets expected to be realised by December 31, and sustained beyond this date.