Refurbished line gets Swazi Rail up to speed

JAMES HALL
MBABANE - Swaziland Railways celebrates its 40th birthday in style this year, with a refurbished line, the settlement of a thorny labour dispute, and a secure customer base.
Established in 1964, the company remains as it was in the beginning, orientated toward freight transport.
“The record shows we are good at what historically we have done best - move goods and commodities in a timely and dependable way,” Gideon Mahlalela, CEO of Swaziland Railways, told FTW.
Considered one of Swaziland’s more innovative company chiefs, Mahlalela brought the rail system into the computer age, and rehabilitated an infrastructure first built to bring iron ore to Japan via the port of Maputo.
“Before our renovations were completed, some stretches of the system required trains to slow to 20 kph. We are now uniformly up to 60 kph, the speed the system was designed for,” Mahlalela said.
Most of the customers’ goods travel to Durban. As if to give the railway a birthday present dearly sought by Swazi rail freight users, Spoornet has expedited the handling of Swaziland-bound goods, according to Stevenson Ngubane, Swaziland Railway’s marketing director.
Trucks might be able to best the 19 hours a train takes to move from Durban to Swaziland’s Inland Container Depot, the dry port at the Matsapha Industrial Site where raw materials are unloaded and finished goods for export depart, but reliability of service and dependability of schedule draw customers to rail transport, says Ngubane.