Rail-to-road rampage!

It’s a perfect storm: poor management, idle locomotives, cable theft and ageing equipment have combined to bring Transnet to its knees, unleashing thousands of trucks on the roads. NICK PORÉE warns of dire consequences to this sorry situation…

The transport and logistics crisis in South Africa is spinning into a tornado as the railway reneges on its commitments and is replaced by a surge of articulated tipper combinations transporting bulk commodities to ports and curtain siders carrying imported containerised cargoes inland. The knock-on effects will be significant and are another facet of the mismanagement of the state-owned corporations (SOCs), which is crippling the economy and will eventually come back to bite the taxpayer.

Railway coal delivery is expected to be short by about 30 million tonnes and the mines are trying desperately to take advantage of international coal prices, which were $265 (R4,505) per tonne in 2022 but are now down to $127 (R2,286) per tonne. The ports of Richards Bay and Durban are under siege from the vast army of tippers delivering coal, manganese, ferrochrome, and other bulk minerals. The current queue is about 220 trucks, stretching over 8.2km. These vehicles take 48 hours to feed from the N2 national route at Nseleni to the port of Richards Bay, while Durban is also overwhelmed with tipper combinations.

At both ports, coal is being dumped on the ground and then reloaded into skips, which are taken alongside the ships and tipped into the holds with ship’s gear. This is very messy and inefficient, but it is the only way to do it when you cannot use the hyper-efficient handling infrastructure specifically designed for the railway system to load ships at a rate of 5,000 tonnes/hr. Using the “clean berths” for coal at Richards Bay and Durban also has negative impacts for other products, as wind-driven coal dust permeates other installations.

The effects on the road infrastructure have yet to be seen and the costs have yet to be calculated. About 20 vehicles per hour pass through Piet Retief and Pongola (day and night) on the N2. There are also flows of trucks travelling on the gravel roads in the Zululand District and down the R34 via Melmoth and Nkwaleni. In all areas, the roads are deteriorating very quickly.

In 2017, freight traffic on the N2 at Mtubatuba amounted to about 32,538 vehicles per annum. In 2019, it was 42,132, and in 2023 it is estimated to be well over 60,000. There are also increased flows on the N11 via Newcastle, bound for the Port of Durban, which exported 12 million tonnes of bulk commodities in 2022 and is now handling coal at Maydon Wharf.

One of the negative impacts of this irregular transport aberration is that drivers are forced to spend up to four days in their trucks with no opportunity to buy food or water, or to reach any hygiene facilities.

Trucks are being diverted to staging areas on some routes or merely stopped in roadside queues on others. None of them are adequately equipped to provide these drivers with the facilities they so desperately need.

The real and inevitable future danger is that a large number of the operators who have hastily entered into the long-haul bulk business do not even realise that they are in fact not making sufficient profit to cover their operating costs and investment in vehicles. In many cases, the rates offered by the mines are insufficient to compensate for the inefficiency and fixed costs of the delays. It can be shown that the standing cost of a big vehicle combination is R200 to R300/hr, so a 48-hour delay cuts as much as R10,000 off the rates of R850 per tonne (R28,000 per load).

If the railway recovers somewhat, or the coal price drops (as it will), there will be a chaotic glut of unemployed truck owners and their drivers facing ruin. The authorities do not have any reasonable response to this impending chaos, as there is no system for regulating trucking and no one knows how many operators have flooded into the market.

Maybe it is significant that, after a number of National Master Plans and studies which were never implemented, both Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal are embarking on their own Road Transport Master Plans. Maybe the provinces, which are supposed to control road traffic, will start to rein in the cowboys and halt the stampede. With the proposed new dispensations, they may also be able to sort out rail freight and the ports.