Rovos steaming ahead but Transnet often not on board
| The founder of the foremost luxurious private rail company has a problem sticking to the timetable
THE passenger train service Rohan Vos started on the sniff of an oil rag 28 years ago has been voted among the seven most luxurious in the world, and a documentary about his achievement won a recognition award at the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards in Los Angeles in June.
Rovos Rail has been growing at a steady 10% a year for four years and passenger numbers, 95% of them foreigners, are where they need to be.
However, there is a big “but” to all this. His trains need to run on time. For many years this has not been happening. And instead of getting better, the situation has been getting worse.
His well-heeled passengers, who pay an average of $1 500 (about R21 400) a day, are beginning to complain about late starts, unscheduled delays and late arrivals. Word is getting around and would-be customers are sending him anxious inquiries.
“In the last 18 months to two years, things have got pretty bad on the delay side and it has been noticed by guests,” says Vos. “They’re writing to us to say they ‘note’ that our trains are delayed often. That is probably the scariest part for me; when something like that starts.”
What is even scarier is that he is powerless to do anything about it. The one, probably the only, weakness of the Rovos Rail model is its dependence on Transnet. Transnet manages the rail infrastructure that Vos depends on entirely to run his trains on time.
So dependent is he that he can’t afford to get too shirty about their inefficiencies.
“We’ve had to bite the bullet and just accept the fact [of] inefficiencies.”
But for all the sky-high executive salaries and talk of Transnet upping its game, the inefficiencies have got “continuously worse. It’s been a slow, steady downhill slide, I’m afraid.” It has affected his operation “considerably”, he says.
“I’ve made them aware of that. Whether they take cognisance of it is another story.”
Apart from vandalism such as cable theft, the problems are mostly to do with infrastructure that is old, has not been properly maintained, breaks down and takes an age to fix.
“If you have a lightning strike in Johannesburg, then you know you’re not going anywhere.”
The signals go down and it’s three, four or five hours before they’re repaired. “As they say, s**t happens. But how quickly you repair it is the most important issue.”
Transnet ordered more than a thousand new locomotives five years ago, “but they’re very slow in arriving”, he says.
“The locos we are being hauled by are between 20 and 40 years old.”
He has nine of his own electric locos and six diesel locos bought on auction from Australia 18 months ago. But he is not allowed to use them on the national network in South Africa. “There was tentative permission, then it was withdrawn. We’re waiting for contracts now so that we can use them.”
It would be “only logical” for Transnet to allow him to run his locos on its network, he says, “but then obviously we’d be setting a precedent”.
Other operators such as mining companies would want to run their own locos and trucks on the network as well.
As he sees it, this would be no bad thing. “The railways would be in a position to follow the advice I gave them in 1990” — which was to become landlords and allow private enterprise to run the railway system. Transnet would just maintain the railway lines and rent them out.
“Private enterprise is much better placed to compete with available cargo and get stuff off RAILWAY BUFF: Rohan Vos of Rovos Rail stands alongside the Pride of Africa in Pretoria the roads. Allow operators around the country to compete and I’m pretty sure you would see the road trucks dropping in number quite rapidly.”
It goes without saying that Vos, 70, is intimately acquainted with the business of running trains and motivating people — he employs around 300 to deliver a world-class service.
Transnet’s underperformance is no mystery, he says.
“If you don’t have very strong motivational reasons for people to be working hard, being productive, it must be incredibly difficult to run things. Private enterprise would have enough of a problem. I don’t know how government even thinks they can do it. But they do.”
Lack of accountability is another big problem, he says.
“If I were the railway boss, the first and foremost thing would be accountability. From the top. Because even those in senior positions I feel are not held accountable for things not going as smoothly as they should. And of course you see this around the country.”
Unlike many of South Africa’s most successful entrepreneurs, Vos has no specialist financial training or academic qualification. But he has run his own businesses since the age of 20, starting with a disco. “I started with bugger all, but quickly learnt the basics: that you buy something for a rand and sell it for R1.25.”
A mechanic at heart, his second business was an auto spares company. Then he used R400 from the sale of an old Packard car that he’d rebuilt to buy a derelict coach at an auction, restore it and get permission to hitch it to South African Railways trains for family holidays.
Vos fell in love with trains while commuting between Delareyville in the old Eastern Transvaal, where his father was a doctor, and Cape Town, where he was a boarder at Bishops.
He scoured old rail yards and sidings for more derelict coaches to renovate, and thus, in 1989, was born Rovos Rail.
The first five years were “horrific”. He sold businesses he’d spent 20 years building, and a plane and the yacht in which he’d done the Cape Town-to-Uruguay race, in a desperate battle to keep his trains running.
“Even if I had no passengers booked, I had to run the schedule. I lost a box of money, I nearly croaked. We nearly saw our bums in 1993.” By 2005, he was out of debt and has “made a very serious effort never to go back into debt again”.
His trains need to run at 50% capacity to break even, but this leaves nothing for anything else, including the all-important promotional and sales work.
The global financial crisis of 2008-09, the cholera epidemic in Mozambique and the Ebola scare all hurt him badly. Ebola cost him a 15% drop in passenger numbers. He’s hoping the trains will be 60% full this year.
Rovos has been growing at 10% a year for the past four years. “Anything faster than that and your infrastructure starts to take strain,” he says.
He’s turning scrap carriages into revenue-earning carriages as fast as he can, “but sometimes it’s a struggle to keep up”.
His most profitable routes are in South Africa, although the 30day route to Dar es Salaam and back, which runs five times a year, is usually 70% full.
Travelling through Africa is “full of logistical dangers and operational problems”. If the air conditioning fails in northern Zambia, there are no spares or people to fix it. They have to hire a plane to fly technicians from South Africa.
If there’s a software problem on the computer-driven locos — “which horrifies me because I’m very much a nuts and bolts guy; I have this terrible worry that the computer goes down” — they have to hire a loco at vast expense.
The tracks in Africa are so bad that the train often has to crawl along at 10 or 15km/h.
Vos feels that what gives him the edge over other luxury trains around the world is attention to detail. “I’ve just spent two days on a shower nozzle. Why? Because it’s got 11 holes in it and I think one with 15 would be better. We’ve had to have it made and tested under different pressures.”
Being voted among the top seven most luxurious trains in the world does not excite him overmuch. Having experienced all the top trains, he has no doubt that Rovos is right at the top. “We certainly feel we have done everything to make sure that we are on the top. I’ve ticked all the boxes I can think of to make sure we’re ahead of the game. If I thought somebody was chasing us, I would change the game.”
Until Transnet changes, that might not be enough.
His well-heeled passengers are beginning to complain about late starts Tracks in Africa are so bad the train often has to crawl along at 10 or 15km/h