LOSING TRACK

Much has been made of the ‘ghost trains’ running coal to South Africa’s export port. But fixing the freight rail system requires more than exorcising this spectre

Weighing in at 31t, a single coal wagon is deadweight hardware. Consider that wagon, loaded to its 16t capacity and multiplied by 200 the total rolling stock in Transnet Freight Rail’s (TFR’s) “shongololo” configuration. Then add the locomotives pulling and pushing the whole shebang. That’s a lot of train to lose.

Yet this is precisely what TFR says has happened. Last month, the company claimed “ghost trains” are making mineral deliveries “off-plan”. Taken to its logical conclusion, grand theft loco of this order would be worth billions of rand a year in lost revenue.

After the announcement, a former employee told Transnet in an e-mail the FM has seen: “It’s surprising it’s only being investigated now because it’s been happening for years. These ‘ghost trains’ would run without ordinarily being on the ITP [integrated train planning system] with the crew running them over the 18-21 hours on duty.”

Theft of this order would be remarkably well co-ordinated, requiring the complicity of train crews, TFR staff at dispatch and port-side, and most worryingly at control. As one industry executive tells the FM, you need senior people in planning to make sure trains go missing. Yet how do they, exactly? According to an industry source, one technique is to cancel a planned train. This can be achieved on some trumped-up technical glitch at, say, a coal siding, where loading takes place. “We had a situation where TFR asked for more lighting. Before we were able to supply it, which would be a matter of 45 minutes, the train had disappeared,” the source says.

Another tactic is to run trains completely off plan. TFR typically schedules 22 or 23 coal trains a day, but a 24th may run, carrying coal. Industry sources won’t speculate on the provenance of that load. “We’d be treading on very tricky ground there,” one tells the FM.

In the past, there would have been some oversight from Richards Bay Coal Terminal (RBCT), the privately held facility that loads coal onto ships for export. But TFR took over management of RBCT several years ago.

Speaking to the FM, a coal executive says he doesn’t believe “ghost trains” are a widespread problem. Not that malfeasance of this magnitude couldn’t be perpetrated, but rather because he thinks the problem has a more prosaic, if no less worrying, answer.

“I think it’s overblown. The ghost trains really refer to trains that are incorrectly allocated largely to juniors who have coal,” he says. “This all arrives at [RBCT] anyway, and the rail would be paid for.”

Coal producers are reconciling their cancellations with RBCT receipts and will be able to unpack “the black box” shortly, he says.

The mining sector is reticent to comment formally when approached by the FM. In part, this is because Minerals Council South Africa is participating in a “collaborative structure” with Transnet aimed at resolving an expensive decline in volumes last year.

This has yet to deliver meaningful improvement. As of March, the annualised rate of coal delivered to RBCT was about 50Mt, higher than the

43Mt “tempo” for January and February, but way below previous delivery averages and