Production line brings on 20 wagons a week LIKE MANY African railway systems Zambia Rail (RSZ) is trying to regain market share from road by improving its services and reliability. Kevin Mayhew spoke to the general manager of RSZ, Babe Botana, at head office in Kabwe. FTW: What is RSZ? BB: It is what used to be Zambian Railways until 2003 when it was taken over by our mother company, New Limpopo Bridge Investments, today known merely as NLPI. The Mauritius-registered company has overseas as well as South African shareholding and cut links with Spoornet in March – until then its operating subcontractor. RSZ is therefore a subsidiary of NLPI. It handles all railway operations and services using the rail infrastructure and rail assets from Livingstone to Chilalimbobwe on the border with the DRC. FTW: What are the details of the concession? BB: The freight concession is for 20 years extendable for five and then a further five years FTW: What were your initial objectives? BB: Reliability and dependability of the service. That meant undertaking good investments in track and locomotive maintenance and upgrading as well as wagons. We also had to restore the communications that go with railways. All these had suffered many decades of neglected maintenance. Our initial phase was one of first aid to remove the entire system from intensive care to a general ward. FTW: Have you achieved that? BM: Yes. We have covered over 500km in that programme of initial investment in track. We have dealt with about eight locomotives - three are up and running and a further five will be completed by the end of this year. We have put in place a wagon production line where we are producing about 20 wagons every week FTW: How have you fared in terms of business targets? BB: The idea was to optimise the net ton kilometres as well as the average distance. We are not focusing too much on the volumes in terms of tonnages. The longer the average distance with higher tons per every kilometre of haul, the more money you make. That is our business. Railways are for long-haul and road for short feeder services FTW: What are your figures now? BB: The average distance is almost 500 kilometres compared to under 300 kilometres under Zambia Railways. In terms of net ton kilometres the figure is now over 600 million net ton kilometres compared with the previous operator. So overall from a business perspective we are meeting our targets; from a capital investment perspective we are almost getting there. FTW: What figures were involved in capital investment? BB: In US dollar terms we have invested about ten million in the past two years. That translates into 30 billion kwacha. We found it prudent to strike a balance between utilisation of own funding and utilisation of available loan facilities to carry out our initial investment programmes. FTW: Have you introduced regular trains? BB: Contradictory as it may seem, we are running a fixed schedule with a lot of flexibility. We are running three freight trains each way from Ndola in the north to Livingstone in the south every day coupled with intermediate and feeder services between major traffic centres. Although the timetable might specify a time, there is flexibility in terms of actual running times to take care of specific and complex customer requirements. We are providing feeder services for various commodities such as fuel, sugar and even copper which are moved a short distance by road under contract to hauliers. We then take it on to destinations that the line serves. Service level agreements have been signed with our clients for these services.
