TFR service – a catalogue of woes

So much for the government’s policy of encouraging cargo to move from road to rail, according to prominent members of the freight industry. “It’s just impossible to rail things,” said Margrit Wolff, MD of Buffalo Freight, “ask anyone in the industry. “Until they sort out the mess they’ve got Transnet Freight Rail (TFR) into, we just can’t rail it.” And another, but anonymous, member of the freight forwarding sector agrees with the description of a “mess”. “What Transnet always fails to mention is the problems that regular cargo attracts – granted which are not all their fault,” she said. To highlight these varied TFR problems, our source forwarded only a few of the e-mail communications she had received recently – indicating various problems that were slowing down the speed of cargo movement around the country. “These are a few,” she said. “Let’s not even mention strike action and acts of God.” A primary problem, our contact pointed out, is that many ships leave Durban short-shipped – regularly listed by Transnet Port Terminals (TPT) in its daily port reports. And, in notifying clients of this situation, Transnet and its railway arm TFR come up with e-mail communications like: “Attached list of export volumes ex CDP (City Deep) terminal that may ‘Arrive late’ based on the high export volumes in the terminal. Take note that the numbers might be impacted (increased) even further should we have incidents on the network and CDP terminal.”