'close co-operation with road users necessary for logistics solutions'
RAIL AND road operators may, technically, be in competition with each other but a spirit of co-operation is needed in this country between them in order to meet logistics
problems which arise regularly, says Herman Evert, Spoornet's g.m. strategic marketing.
With this in mind, he says, Spoornet is doing a complete about-turn in its approach to freight handling on its services, with particular regard to schedules.
What is projected is treating freight reservations 'in the same manner as a passenger is treated on an airline'. Schedules will have to be treated on a regular, weekly basis, to meet the needs of the customer, and not the reverse as has been the railway method for the past century.
This would have been regarded as crazy in the not-so-distant past, but it is the way we have to go and we are confident we will have the last pieces in the system by the second half of this year, he says.
What we have had to do is to develop systems which will make every railway car wagon profitable.
The new system will, therefore, be customer-driven, and Spoornet has introduced a sales team charged with gaining a complete understanding of the customer's business, allowing them to provide suitable feedback to the rail operator. In this way schedules can be drawn up for the week ahead.
Here we must work closely with road operators as well. If the service providers are working together, it will be possible to offer a complete logistics solution, not simply a rail transport contract.
This will, in all probability, mean no large infrastructure developments in the country, apart from the Richards Bay coal line and the Sishen-Saldanha ore line, which are Spoornet's main freight sectors at present.
These two, he says, are among the most heavy-haul lines in the world and, in order to keep the users competitive in the international market, the standard of efficiency must improve by between 1% and 3% each year.
About half the goods transported on the Richards Bay line are not coal, making it imperative that flexibility be built in to the system in addition to the constant upgrading on both lines, especially in terms of signalling and braking innovations.
There are some parts of the national network which cannot be operated profitably at present, he says, and it will become necessary to separate the high-density rail services from the low-density areas.
We may have to move the low-density services into a separate company, but it is not viable to discontinue any of these as they provide a vital link into the main high-tech lines.
