South African rail security problems laid bare – WorldCargo News

News 2 Jan 2025 by WCN Editorial
South African rail security saw slight improvement, but operational issues rose, with 278 derailments, and 687 collisions.
Little improvement has been made in South African rail security and operational reliability over the past year, according to the latest annual report from the country’s Railway Safety Regulator, RSR.
While underinvestment and the cancellation of orders for 1,064 locomotives as a result of corruption investigations have played a role in poor rail performance in recent years, there is no doubt that the orchestrated vandalism of overhead cables and other track infrastructure for sale as scrap has had a big impact.
According to the Annual State of Safety Report, which covers the year to 31 March 2024, Transnet Freight Rail (TFR) operated services over 25.91million km in 2023-24, a tiny fall from 25.93million km in the previous year, but this in itself was a huge 12% fall on 2021-22, so the situation is yet to improve. Although the number of security-related incidents fell from 8,643 in 2022-23 to 7,420 in 2023-24, the number of operational problems jumped from 1,833 to 2,496.
RSR combines its figures for rail-related deaths and injuries in its Fatalities and Weighted Injuries Index (FWI). The FWI for 2022-23 recorded 18.8 incidents, with a total of 109.5 incidents over the entire period 2018-2023. However, 83.8 were recorded in 2023-24 alone, with 85 fatalities and 181 injuries during rail operations, and another 74 fatalities and 98 injuries in security-related incidents. A total of 36% of all incidents occurred in just one province, KwaZulu-Natal, where two major railways run to the ports of Durban and Richards Bay.
There was no breakdown of the figures to identify how many of these deaths and injuries were caused by organised crime involved in rail vandalism, but 5,461 cases of theft were recorded, of which 21% involved vandalism.
The report notes 278 derailments and 687 collisions of rolling stock, 126 occurrences of people being struck by trains, and 140 incidents of electrical power outages. The RSR called for increased collaboration between stakeholders, robust regulatory enforcement and investment in resilient railway infrastructure to mitigate security and weather-related risks, while improving performance.
In 2024, TFR has taken steps to improve the movement of coal to Richards Bay, but volume is projected to fall short of TFR’s target to move 60mt by rail to the port this year. Richards Bay handled 48.7mt of coal in 2023, the lowest level the port had exported in over a decade.
The capacity of Richards Bay Coal Terminal (RBCT) is just over 90mtpa. With Russian coal exports banned from Europe, South Africa is missing out on valuable exports due to supply chain problems.
Exxaro Resources reports that from January to October, TFR “railed” 42.1mt of coal to RBCT, a run rate that is equivalent to an annualised volume of 51.2mt and short of TFR’s 60mtpa target.
Exxaro said that TRF averaged three trains per week from Grootegeluk “due to the impact of security, vandalism, and locomotive shortages. The Mpumalanga export rail performance averaged eight trains per week for the same period. With the support of the coal industry through the Corridor Recovery Team and the identified initiatives, the rail performance improved during the year from an annualised tempo of 47mt to 50.5mt.”
Of the 278 derailments tallied by the RSR, Exaaro said just two had a major impact on coal volumes in 2024.
*This story first appeared in the December print issue of WorldCargo News
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