RAND, STEAM, SPEED

With its marble baths and black-tie dinners, The Blue Train from Johannesburg to Cape Town is one of the world's most luxurious

TINY wavelets of hot water ripple rhythmically across my suntanned body; bubbles wink at the brim of a chilled champagne flute brushing my languorous hand. When I lift my lotus-eater eyes from the marble-clad bath, I see tin shacks and poor blacks vanishing silently past my double- glazed window; each a glimpse, and gone forever. Nothing to do with me, J Glancey, Cabin B passenger, name emblazoned on the door, snug in my bubble bath aboard The Blue Train.

This is one of the world's last regularly scheduled luxury trains. Popular with well-heeled tourists (my cabin cost pounds 502, a seat on the regular train pounds 455), it is also very much a businessman's express - express being a relative term, as this 800-ton ocean liner on wheels takes a leisurely 25 hours to cover the 1,400km between Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Only rarely do the Afrikaans-speaking drivers raise The Blue Train's languid cruising pace above 100km per hour. This is right and fitting because The Blue Train, unlike theme-park trains like The Orient Express, is a true survivor of the Edwardian era. The current air-conditioned rolling stock might date from as recently as 1972, but its sybaritic style speaks of an age of rail service, shoeshine and polish that vanished when Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the British Empire ran headlong into the buffer stops of history.

So, I lie and soak in a full-length bath, barely aware of steel wheels ironing out the rail joints of South Africa's premier main line. Having bathed (a crisp white bath robe rocks gently from a hook on the door waiting to further cosset a spoilt body) and drained the champagne, there is all the time in the southern hemisphere to sit at one's writing desk, browse through menus and wine lists and raise the electric blinds for a sneaky (ie embarrassed) check to see if the train has passed safely out of sight of Soweto, the vast, sprawling former township spoiling the view from my panoramic window.

Luckily, we have (luckily for my feelings of uneasy guilt, that is). Unending ranges of orange hills have replaced the Chicago-like townscape of the grim-faced goldrush city of Jo'burg. The coach next to mine is the cocktail bar and lounge, a glorious confection of wood veneer panelling, lush bowls of loud flowers, plush carpet and low-level Seventies-style hotel lobby sofas. Coffee is served in South African Railways silver pots (made in England). Waiters are egregiously subservient; everything they do for you is, as South Africans say, a "plizshir" (pleasure, to you and me).

A trickle of folk in spotless leisurewear makes its way to the coach beyond. This is the restaurant car, as lavish an eaterie as you will find this side of The Savoy Grill. Tables are weighed down with white, starched cloths bejewelled with silver and stainless-steel cutlery. You need these to tackle unfamiliar intricacies like crocodile tail and fillet of ostrich.

The five courses of our lunch are delicately served as The Blue Train rolls past a distant township. Ragged children wave; the diners at the table in front of me (polished young American bankers and their simpering, Rolex-wristed girlfriends) raise their glasses to the children.

So sumptuous is the meal that I am reduced to taking no more than a token forkful from each course, no matter how delicious. I have to remember that dinner, a much more daunting proposition, is yet to come.

Early that evening the train makes a prolonged stop at Kimberley. Here we are served a glass of local sherry before being eased on to brutal- looking coaches that take us to see Kimberley's Big Hole. Why? Because it is there, of course. The Big Hole, a sign tells us, is 215m deep and from these depths 14,504,566 carats (or 2,722kg) of diamonds were extracted between 1871 and 1914. Kimberley is not your common or garden hole.

Having peered incomprehendingly into its watery depths, we tour the Kimberley diamond mine museum, a theme park that holds the same fascination for me as counting street lamps. What it paints is a saccharine-sweet picture of what must have been a brutal and dreadful world, where the begrimed poor suffered to make the filthy rich filthier and richer.

Still, the Blue Trainies are happy, reeling off miles of video tape. And who am I to worry about the rape of nature and the brutalisation of mankind that took place here before the Great War, when this evening's dinner lures us back aboard the train.

Dinner is formal, a jacket-and-tie and little-black-dress affair. The appetites of the other 91 passengers are clearly undiminished by lunch. Cut-glass winks under the soft glow of table lamps, a husband and wife glower at one another silently (just as they did at lunch), two Cape Town businessmen quaff and trough in between phone calls (a South African without a mobile phone is as rare a sight as a flying ostrich). Night falls and, for me at least, bed beckons. I do not feel up to making small-hours small talk about golf (another South African obsession), manly sports and what's wrong with the country today.

So, I slip into freshly laundered and crisp white linen sheets - a true "plizshir" - and vanish instantly into the world of railbound Nod. In the morning, a five-course breakfast beckons; I manage one course, but most passengers are made of heartier stuff. The train is now loping through the lush winelands of the Cape. The scenery is magical, but reminds some ashen-faced passengers - toying listlessly with breakfast - of the vinicultural excesses of the day before.

The Blue Train stops at Worcester, 108km from Cape Town, so the passengers can stretch their legs, buy newspapers and breathe unconditioned air. It's also an opportunity for me to board the leading locomotive, a robust blue electric built 30 years ago in England. The cab is cramped and brutally ugly, a world away from the plush and floral displays of the 16 air-conditioned coaches coupled behind. There is not so much as a washbasin to be seen.

The driver struggles with my English, I with his Afrikaans. Luckily, the lingua franca of railway lore comes to our rescue. Tired of 21 hours of unmitigated luxury, I ride up front for the rest of the journey, listening to the growling thrum of the four 836hp motors and watching, through vine poles and electric catenary, Cape Town yaw into view. It is a magnificent sight, this seaside city sprouting from under the daunting vastness of Table Mountain.

Johannesburg, you think, might be a thousand miles away; and it is - a thousand miles and another world away. The only similarity is that, as it approaches Cape Town, The Blue Train must snake its way through the troubled townships that ring the city. There are more murders here than there are in rough, tough Johannesburg. Seen from this viewpoint, beautiful Cape Town is like a wide-eyed lady who offers undying love, then stabs you fatally in the back.

Just as our Ritz-on-wheels rolls into the terminus, the driver gives a blast on his horn as a salute to "The Red Devil", a magnificent South African Railways steam locomotive, one of few still in service. To me, a steam enthusiast, the chance to ride a machine like this was irresistible.

CAPE Town captivated me over the next few days, but I was determined to contrast my plutocratic ride on The Blue Train with a journey by steam - with no air conditioning, no ostrich steaks, and no bath.

Regular steam trains are as hard to find in Nelson Mandela's South Africa as diamonds are in Kimberley's Big Hole - but you cannot keep a steam man down for long. Driving east from Cape Town a few days after my Blue Train experience, I spotted a rhythmic plume of steam trailing over the lake between the southern Cape seaside towns of George and Knsyna. I met the locomotive crossing a long wooden bridge over the lagoon at Knsyna: a polished green Class 24 2-8-4, hauling a mixed train of timber on long wagons, and passengers - some tourists, some locals - in old maroon-and- cream coaches.

While the British-built locomotive was watered and groomed, I climbed on to the footplate to meet the crew. Afrikaaners again; they run the railways. Working-class white supremacists they may be, but they are extraordinarily generous. Yes, they said, the 50-mile line skirting the sea and climbing the hills between Knsyna and George is 100 per cent steam. It carries passengers, mainly tourists (because the modern road below is much faster for locals). The line is principally used for fetching and carrying timber, and will continue to be steam for the forseeable future.

Next day, I return to the station at Knysna. It is very dry and very hot. I board the locomotive of the 0945 train to George: this time my mount is a black Class 19D 4-8-2. The cab is clean and groomed, with all tackle trimmed. There are no steam leaks. The fire purrs like a contented lion while steam compressed to 200lb per square inch plays at the big safety valves on top of the long boiler.

A bell, flag and chime whistle, a tug of the throttle, a slipping of wheels and we puff our way purposefully around the fringe of this pretty town, past the clapboard tapas bar, past the ragged-trousered fishermen dangling makeshift lines from the sides of the bridge and, whistling across dusty roads, climb briskly into the hills, high above the road and into the kind of unspoilt scenery that journeys along main roads never offer.

The flamboyant Blue Train, with all its baroque excess, cannot come anywhere near matching the splendour of the sooty, three-hour ride offered by the 0945 from Knysna. The line limit is just 50km per hour, but even this seems ambitious when faced with such daunting gradients and tortuous curves.

The train's acceleration from stations up the hills is quite breathtaking, the breeze through the cavernous cab deliciously scented with hot oil and superheated smoke. Now we run through waterlands, now through a tangle of grand vegetation. Now we burst out of a long, whistling tunnel to run by the sea at Victoria Bay. Here steam and waves, soot and spray mate in an elemental orgy of sound and sensation. Make it last forever, please. But George hoves into sight - a workaday station filled with steam locomotives hard at work - and we squeal to a halt for lunch.

My crew take me to eat in their canteen, where we struggle with language once again. Despite the temperature (which is somewhere in the mid-80s) we fall to steaming plates of beefy stew and piping mugs of Rooibosh tea. I ride back to Knysna on the sun-scorched cushions of the rear passenger carriage, watching our locomotive bark its way round the infinity of bends that lead it eastwards. I arrive back at my b&b covered in a fine coating of oil and soot. Time for another bath. JG