TFR: Introducing time-tabled freight trains

[Steve Appleton]

From Business Day, 16 November 2011.

Timetable plan to boost Transnet Freight Rail
NICKY SMITH
Transport and Tourism Editor

TRANSNET Freight Rail (TFR), the state-owned logistics group, was introducing scheduled rail services which it hoped would create more predictability for its customers and create greater efficiency, CEO Siyabonga Gama said yesterday.

The move to a scheduled railway, which creates a fixed timetable for train arrival and departure times for each train on its network, was being implemented on TFR’s Northeast and Eastern corridors. Fixed schedules were already being operated on some of TFR’s lines, specifically moving coal to Eskom’s Majuba power station, the coal service to the Matola terminal in Maputo’s port and for magnetite and rock phosphate from Phalaborwa to Richards Bay, TFR said.

The change to scheduling would immediately affect about 19-million tons of freight a year, which was about "21% of the business that we do on our general freight lines", Mr Gama said yesterday. "We have had to do a lot of preparation with our customers and our suppliers," Mr Gama said.

The new plan required co-ordination along the supply chain. In the pilot projects that had been run with magnetite and coal, problems had already arisen with bottlenecks at the ports. Trains carrying coal were getting stranded at Matola terminal and the manganese terminals because "we have pumped so many trains through that the wagons stand empty because the schedules for shipping have not been changed. However, we are dealing with those," Mr Gama said.

Transnet hoped a scheduled service would assist in improving its fleet utilisation. Locomotive productivity on the general freight business is about 22000 tonne-kilometres per locomotive per month while global benchmarks for top rail operators are between 29000 and 32000 tonne-kilometres per month.

Wagon cycle times across the fleet average 12 days. "Our aim is to move from 12 to eight days and we believe that a scheduled railway can assist us," Mr Gama said.

Transnet has the task of moving rail-friendly freight off roads and back to rail. The utility has suffered from decades of underinvestment in infrastructure and it has taken years for the operator to be able to start investing to address the backlog. A multi-billion rand deficit in Transnet’s pension funds also acted as a brake on its ability to spend money keeping the rail operations in working order.

TFR needed to replace rail at a rate of at least 2000km a year but was only able to fund 400km a year, Mr Gama said.

Public Enterprises Minister Malusi Gigaba said this month that the government was exploring plans to as much as treble Transnet’s existing five-year capital expenditure budget to beyond R330bn. More than 60% of Transnet’s capital budget is committed to upgrading and expanding TFR’s rolling stock and network.

A successful scheduled railway would free up capacity where there was little additional ability to respond to increased demand in rail services, Mr Gama said. There was as much as 25-million tonnes of rail-friendly freight Transnet was not able to service.

Changing the way the rail service operated was already complex as it required planning across all units of the business such as staff rostering, maintenance and track configuration. All of this was complicated by ageing rolling stock, with the average age of wagons of about 34 years making reliability an issue. The world-class average age of wagons is 12 years.

[Steve Appleton]

From Business Day, 15 November 2011

Transnet Freight Rail to run its trains on time
Rail unit of Transnet says it will return to a system of scheduled departure times for its trains

NICKY SMITH
Published: 2011/11/15 02:58:07 PM

Transnet Freight Rail (TFR), the rail unit of state-owned freight and logistics business Transnet, says its new scheduled railway services will improve its reliability and efficiency. TFR is running between 750 and 1025 trains a day across the country, it said in a statement handed to journalists at a briefing in Johannesburg on Tuesday.

The practice of scheduled departure times was abandoned in favour of "tonnage-based dispatching", which relies on the accumulation of enough cargo before a train starts its journey. However, this had the unintended effect of disrupting the efficient use of equipment, locomotives and crews, TFR said.

"It also yielded inconsistent transit times, making delivery service less reliable at a time when our customers need better service to compete in their own markets," said Siyabonga Gama, CEO.

To run scheduled railways, all activities along the supply chain need to be co-ordinated. "TFR will thus rely heavily on customers loading and offloading according to agreed time norms, and cargo-handling terminals doing the same, so that appropriate benchmarks of wagon turnaround times and locomotive efficiency can be achieved," the company said.

TFR will introduce scheduling across its network in phases and expects to complete the process by the middle of next year.

[Aidan McCarthy]

Hi,

What I always wondered about the previous method of sending trains when you had a full load was how they rostered crew. Did the crew wait around until the train was ready eating into their 8 hour duty time or were they called to drive at random times?

Cheers