The next fifty years will see a revival of rail – and if this doesn’t happen through initiatives, it will be forced upon us. This was the message from Professor Jan Havenga when he addressed a meeting organised by the Consumer Goods Council in Cape Town last week, where the deterioration of South Africa’s roads and road safety also came under close scrutiny. While there has been a massive revival of rail use in the UK, USA and Europe, there are integral problems in SA, where non-reliability is one of them. “We have to design a system where service and reliability are improved and this must come from intervention. After that we need a ‘jump of faith’ to make it work!” Havenga said. Inevitably cost saving was one of the key benefits on which Transnet Freight Rail’s Nelis Van Tonder focused. “There is a cost saving of up to 35% using rail as opposed to road, as well as indirect cost savings like a decrease in hijackings and theft and faster evacuation of containers,” he said. According to Andy Connoll of the SA Association of Freight Forwarders, the solution in this move from road to rail is ‘teamwork and stamina’ and he believes that training is an even worse problem in this country than infrastructure. “Our people skills are just incredibly low,” he says. “We live in a world that wants instant gratification, and in our industry that means ‘door to door delivery, on time’. “These corridors rely on planning, and when a team pulls together everything flows. But our wheels seldom run smoothly.”
