KEEPING FREIGHT TRAIN BUSINESS ON TRACK
Freight Terminal management and staff using innovation to defy drought
IT’S estimated that every train leaving the Fletcher Intermodal Freight Terminal on the outskirts of Dubbo is keeping almost 100 semi-trailers off our roads, and what began its life as a grain terminal just a decade ago is doing far more than that.
Despite crippling drought across much of the west in the past three years, and prospects of a decimated grain harvest again this year, the Intermodal staff are concentrating on finding other ways of making the operation remain profitable, keeping 50 staff in jobs and creating many advantages for communities west of Dubbo at the same time.
Sarah Granger is the logistics and transport manager at the Intermodal Terminal and says the normal annual throughput of about 24,000 20-foot shipping container equivalents (TU’S) is down to about two thirds that number, incredible considering the region’s croppers have been in an ongoing crisis.
“It’s made it a lot harder to compete in the export market, particularly on the grain side. The meat’s still going but with the grain, it’s quite hard to compete with the likes of Russia and Canada, so we’re doing a lot of domestic trade to service the farmers who are in their second or third year of drought,” Ms Granger told Dubbo Photo News.
There’s been a major push towards attracting a diversification of freight including intermodal ISOS (containerised tanks) of cement to western mines.
“We are diversifying, we’re exporting product for one of the mines out at Cobar, we’ve done a few solar panel jobs, we’ve imported solar panels for big installations out west, we’re packing cotton lint, doing third party logistics for those guys, so that’s all keeping us rolling at present.
“We are one of the only regional trains left running that’s servicing freight to Dubbo and the western area. The drought is hurting a lot of people out west and they’ve come to us and we’ve been able to help them because we’ve been able to keep running. It’s helping provide that rail service to smaller towns who otherwise wouldn’t be getting one because of the lack of demand,” she said.
Intermodal office manager Jake Young said the fact they were able to keep trains running out west was having a huge positive impact for the region and helping to keep other businesses afloat as well as creating new customers for the trains.
“A lot of smaller towns in a normal season would have their own train logistics’ supply chain happening, (but) they can no longer warrant a full train to pick up a few containers of grain because the costs are just astronomical when they’re not filling the train,” Mr Young explained.
So those smaller operators are currently transporting their containers by road into the Fletcher’s terminal where they can be loaded onto a train to be taken the rest of the way.
Mr Young says that reduces the overheads for the smaller operators out west, allowing them to keep functioning.
“They may technically be our competition but they’re supplying us with business by using our train and we’re offering them a service, so it works hand in hand,” he said.
Mr Young said everyone in the company had made it a priority to make sure the intermodal kept functioning even when, by rights, it should have no demand for its services.
“We have a good crew of people here, they’ve been here a number of years, and we’ve put them through the training,” he said, pointing out that it’s far preferable to keep that experience in the business rather than lay people off and then have to recruit afresh when business picks up again. “We’re doing everything we can to keep our workforce employed,” Mr Young said.
The Fletcher family is immensely proud of its workforce and said it’s the innovative concepts from the staff at the grain and intermodal terminal which has allowed the business as a whole to remain viable during such unprecedented seasonal conditions.