RAIL
Gains but no guarantees
Richards Bay ' s coal terminal has clawed its way back from a 2023 low to within reach of its best years in over a decade. The story of how it got there says more about Transnet ' s freight rail ambitions than any single week ' s number could.
By Ebrahim Moolla
Somewhere on the line between the Mpumalanga highveld and the Zululand coast, in the dead hours before a shift change, someone used to come for the copper. A pair of bolt cutters, a stretch of unlit track, and by morning a signal that had stopped talking to the next signal down the line. That was the old story of South Africa ' s coal corridor. Not one catastrophe, but a thousand small sabotages, compounding.
In 2023, Richards Bay Coal Terminal( RBCT) endured its worst year in decades. The terminal that moves roughly nine coal tonnes out of every 10 South Africa exports moved just 47.21 million. Theft, trains without locomotives, and neglected track maintenance dragged the system lower than anyone wanted to admit.
Three years on, Transnet is chasing 61 million tonnes for the current financial year and has 70 million pencilled in for 2028-29. A recent week saw throughput climb 21 % to almost 180 000 tonnes a day, 27 trains running against a target of 22, an annualised rate of 65.7 million tonnes if you squint at it and ignore that a good week, right now, is still mostly a week spent making up for a bad one before it.
“ Railroad iron is a magician ' s rod.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
This is a recovery built out of a great many unglamorous, individually forgettable fixes, and none of them, on their own, would make a headline.
30 sabusinessintegrator. co. za