On a molten Cape summer’s day in February 2012, I hopped a freight train out of Mossel Bay and rode it for 11 hours through the blazing countryside to Worcester.
The driver was a veteran railwayman named Dan Pienaar and it was his last day in the cab after 40 years of heat and dust and sweat, the incessant clamour of banging steel, and diesel exhaust in the throat.
It wasn’t much of a train — 400t, six full petrol tankers and four empty flatcars for braking power, pulled by two ailing diesel locomotives, one of which would quit and die in the veld outside Worcester.
The train felt like an epitaph for a railway that once ran 22,000km of track, much of it electrified, stuffed with freight and passenger trains.
As Dan urged his engines west he pointed out the rusted sidings and empty loading docks, overgrown cattle pens, the shuttered stations and padlocked gates to factories and silos that no longer sent anything by rail. Then, one eye on a truck overtaking us on the parallel N2 near Riversdale, he said: “We’ve lost a lot, and we’ll never get it back.”
We’ve lost a lot, and we’ll never get it back
— Dan Pienaar, railwayman
The Worcester-Voorbaai trunk line ran its last freight train at the end of August, just as transport minister Barbara Creecy announced that private operators have been given access to Transnet’s freight network.
The 11 train operating companies (TOCs), out of 25 that applied, will be running minerals, containers, fuel and sugar, adding 20Mt of freight a year to 41 routes on Transnet’s corridors ... but not on the now-quiet metals east from Worcester.
Of the TOCs, only Grindrod has locomotives or wagons, let alone train-operating experience, though other private operators may be waiting in the wings.
Some, such as mining outfit Menar, have secured slots to run their own product, in this case thermal coal, manganese ore and manganese alloys, or, like the Mediterranean Shipping Company, containers on a corridor where Transnet Freight Rail is already doing a pretty good job.
The slots will run between one and 10 years. That’s better than the two years the government originally proposed, given that any of the operators ordering new locomotives and wagons from scratch will have, at best, a 12-month wait for their rolling stock.
Unless, of course, they rent from the landlord, who has hundreds of preloved but idle engines and wagons parked on almost forgotten sidings ... and only one previous owner.
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