New plan to move freight on rail could slash road deaths
ON A dark Monday last month, a truck collided with a bus on the Moloto road near Kwaggafontein, killing more than two dozen people.
A government spokesman promised immediately that freight would be moved from road to rail to reduce the number of trucks on the roads.
“Twenty-nine people died — it’s crazy, crazy,” said Mike Daniel, CEO of engineering company KPMC, which says it can help government’s road to rail wish come true.
Transnet recently signed memorandums of understanding with two of the country’s biggest road hauliers to explore ways of combining road and rail transport.
If its plans bear fruit, it could clear the way for private-sector businesses to get involved in rail transport.
KPMC hopes to be one of those companies. RailRunner, its US-designed bimodal transport system, uses a container truck chassis with conventional wheels for running on road and a dedicated rail bogie for use on rail.
“RailRunner will do for Africa’s logistics what cellphones did for Africa’s communications,” said Daniel.
“It’s a major jump forward [because] we don’t have road and rail everywhere.”
Traditional intermodal systems involve containers being loaded from trucks onto railway flat cars at dedicated intermodal depots with gantries and mobile cranes.
RailRunner can operate where there is a flat piece of ground, said Daniel. “We don’t have to spend $50-million building an intermodal terminal — we can take any piece of ground that has railway track, level it and it’s a terminal.”
The RailRunner consists of a high-speed rail bogie and a lightweight container chassis. The bogie supports two truck chassis on each end, temporarily converting them from road trucks into a railway freight cars. As many as 200 trailers can be linked together to form a train, although KPMC expects that locally RailRun- ner trains would be no more than 40 wagons long.
The system can also transport anything that fits in a container including minerals, timber, petrol and specialised commodities such as identity-preserved grain.
Daniel noted that some of the major beneficiaries would be junior miners that do not have rail access. The attraction of such systems was that they allowed businesses to concentrate on what they are good at; that’s the era of specialisation,” he said.
Its success, however, depended on a critical mass of traffic, said Henry Posner III, chairman of the Pittsburghbased Railroad Development Corporation, which has operated rail concessions in Mozambique and Malawi.
How come Transnet has not done it on its own?
“The easy answer is that Transnet’s performance has been masked by the continued demand for coal and iron ore, and that has masked what’s going on in the general cargo network,” he said.