TFR booking demands drive customers away

Transnet Freight Rail’s “tedious booking procedures” are raising its customers’ hackles. Transnet advised its clients last year that a new working procedure was to be implemented, first at City Deep in Johannesburg, followed by Pretcon in Pretoria. The new procedure, implemented last November, was to work as follows, it said: “Haulage instructions must reach us 13 days prior to provisional port stacks opening in order for us to submit the intent document in time to TFR; “TFR will approve or reject the intents (depending on their capacity) nine days prior to port stacks opening; “Inland terminal stack opens seven days prior to port stacks open; “The cut-off date for lodging container transport orders (CTOs) is six days prior to port stacks open – if your booking was accepted by TFR; “The procedure applies to shipments via Durban only.” But our forwarding contact blasted the impossibility of complying with this procedure. “Who can plan continuously, two weeks in advance?” she said. “This pushes more cargo to roadfreight – not always costeffective or a green choice.” And it’s a problem that is spread across the SA forwarding industry. While talking to Margrit Wolff of Buffalo Freight, who is also an alternate director of the SA Association of Freight Forwarders (Saaff), she conveyed a message from Jan Ludolph, MD of Geodis Wilson, and a Gauteng regional director of the association. He wanted FTW to know that Saaff was to be discussing this very matter, trying to find some solution to this impractical and nearimpossible demand from TFR. That meeting unfortunately fell right on the FTW copy deadline, and the results of the confab are as yet unknown. But we will report on the issue as soon as it is made available to us.