Spoornet adds capacity on Durban – Jo’burg route

‘Check us out,’ says Transnet executive Kevin Mayhew SPOORNET HAS increased capacity and cut transit time on the Johannesburg – Durban route as part of a turnaround strategy designed to restore its somewhat tarnished reputation. The rail utility has successfully run five scheduled north and south bound freight trains a day for the past month with a delivery time between Johannesburg City Deep and Durban Container Terminal of 1.7 days. Pradeep Maharaj, the group executive strategy and transformation of Spoornet’s holding company Transnet, told FTW in Johannesburg last week that this achievement was in line with the utility’s plan to change the rail infrastructure and schedules along the country’s corridors to meet logistics demands. This, he says, is down from 4.8 days a few years ago. “We have increased freight capacity by more than 30% on the Johannesburg/Durban route. We are not in the business of promises, but having got the delivery time down to an acceptable level, we intend to sustain it “I challenge business not to take our word for this, but to check out for themselves whether we are up to it by using our services,” Maharaj said. He said a regular schedule would automatically guarantee reliability. This would satisfy their clients and enable them to comfortably do their planning. “We are in discussion with our customers to let them know what we offer. Spoornet has always made it clear that we will be introducing turnaround changes in bite-sized chunks and this is one of those chunks,” he added. He said Spoornet would do all that it could to play its part in achieving the long-term strategic objectives of the country – and contributing on a concessionary basis where contracted over the border. “But the supply chain is a complex interaction of parties and each has to play a part in finding solutions. “It is too simple to just blame Spoornet, especially when sometimes we are not at fault. We can present wagons to a siding on time and find a problem there due to any number of factors. That is not our fault, but very often we get the blame when in fact the client has not performed,” he explained. On smoothing out the bottleneck problems at the ports, he says that they have very effective forums have been established which include all role-players at each of the ports. “They represent Spoornet, ports and the private sector and generally emerged content that things are improving. There are always problems, but they are not necessarily the result of the actions of the Transnet companies,” he said.