SEND HEAVY goods by rail, says Allan Jorgensen, joint m.d. of South Africa's only privately-owned railway, the Alfred Country Railway (ACR).
Jorgensen was speaking at ACR's recent tenth anniversary celebration in Port Shepstone where the company was formed in 1987 to operate narrow gauge timber trains to the coast from the timber-growing areas around Harding. The timber is transhipped onto standard gauge railway wagons at Port Shepstone and hauled to the Sappi-Saiccor Mill at Umkomaas and to other mills on the north coast. To date over 800 000 tons of timber have been carried by ACR.
According to Jorgensen the government needs to realise the effects of allowing heavier and heavier truck-loads to use a road system that was not designed for them. The result he claimed, was the poor state of the country's roads, caused as a result of government deregulating road transport without properly thinking through the process.
Despite the fact that ACR has reached its tenth year of operation, it has yet to turn the corner into operating profitability, having accumulated R3-million losses. However, ACR's other m.d. Charlie Lewis claims that ACR has saved the roads department more than R15 million in wear and tear alone during this period.
BY TERRY HUTSON
