The departure of the first reefer train packed with fruit from the northern region of Limpopo and Zimbabwe from the Musina Intermodal Terminal (MIT) Inland Dry Port for the Port of Durban about a fortnight ago marked a major milestone in the citrus industry’s ambitions to migrate freight from road to rail. According to Mitchell Brooke, logistics development manager for the Citrus Growers’ Association (CGA), the train consisted of 38 reefer container wagons pulled by two locos, two flatbed wagons containing two generator sets and a fuel tank, and a caboose providing accommodation for security and technical personnel. Brooke explained that the operation required “a specific train set equipped with two diesel generators (for redundancy purposes), a diesel bowser, and cabling running between the wagons, connecting them to the generator to power the reefers while they’re in transit”. Along with the inaugural reefer train from up north, City Deep also came on line as a citrus train nerve centre days after the Musina load left MIT. “It’s a key node for us,” Brooke said about the additional inland port development in Gauteng. “The intention is that fruit from the Northern Regions (Limpopo and Zimbabwe) will be directly railed to Durban from MIT, Bela Bela and Tzaneen, whilst fruit from the southern/eastern region of Limpopo will gravitate to City Deep from where we will ship the citrus to Durban and Cape Town.” And although the current harvesting season is fast drawing to a close, Brooke said with the recent successes they had experienced in moving fruit by rail, they were aiming to ship about 3 000 containers by season’s end. According to Anand Moodliar, one of MIT’s directors, that target is well within sight. “The first two trains took around 50 hours to reach Durban, well ahead of the nominated vessel stack dates. So the first and second run went very well.” He remarked that the success of the initiative had especially been made possible by the participation of all concerned – the growers, MIT, Transnet Freight Rail (TFR) and MSC. Moodliar was particularly impressed by the commitment and enthusiasm with which Nottingham Estate, citrus producers on the Zimbabwean side of the Limpopo River, embraced the initiative to ship northern SADC citrus by rail. “They haven’t really been in the chilled market before but it’s not as if they are foreign to exports. They have been shipping fruit by road using curtain-side trucks, but when we started speaking to them about exporting fruit using reefer trains they were amongst the first ones to jump in. Leading Limpopo producers like Noordgrens and Alicedale also participated in the initial reefer train from Musina. “Clean reefers are returned empty by rail from the port, where they are offloaded at MIT and trucked to the various farms for packing under supervision of the PPECB (Perishables Product Export Control Board),” Moodliar explained. “It means farmers have direct control over packing. Once packed containers arrive at MIT, the containers are connected to reefer points and the cold chain commences. MSC as a joint venture partner supplied a float stock of reefers so that each train can be offloaded with empty reefers and reloaded with loaded containers to achieve the targeted seven-day cycle time of a train set.” He emphasised that because the entire process was run on a count-down basis, with fruit being packed into containers in four hours or less on the farms, returned to MIT and immediately chilled to the required temperature as it was moved to meet TFR’s schedule and vessel stacking times, an increase in the freight of fruit by rail was expected, with resultant benefits of improvement in fruit quality owing to earlier chilling. Brooke said the aim nationally was to push throughput to 10 000 containers over the next three years, but it would require running at least 16 reefer trains. “We actually started talking to TFR about 10 years ago about increasing the utilisation of rail for citrus, with MIT fully supporting the establishment of a service from their growing regions,” Brooke said. “We found that the only way we were going to get fruit back onto rail was to move empty reefers into the various inland areas where they have to get packed.” With a first reefer train going from Tzaneen to Durban, followed by reefer services from Bela Bela and now Musina, which include substantial loads from Zimbabwe, southern Africa’s citrus industry appears well on track to make significant inroads into international fruit markets. Brooke added that the entire network also included possibly filling empty leg capacity. He said talks were already under way with prospective clients to ship frozen goods on the return leg from the ports up to inland dry ports where the reefers would be unpacked and cleaned before being sent to the various citrus areas.
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It looks like a game changer for the industry. – Mitchell Brooke
