Transnet Freight Rail unveiled the world's longest production train in its efforts to ramp up South African manganese exports and intends applying its lessons to the nascent zinc industry.
By increasing the number of wagons on the heavy-haul line to Saldanha, SA’s iron ore export route, to 375 wagons of 63 tonnes capacity each, Transnet has broken its own record of 342 wagons and set a new world record, the state-owned company said on Thursday.
The train is 4km long and uses sets of locomotives in the front, middle and end of the string of wagons in a carefully choreographed braking and acceleration sequence to cater for parts of the train that are going uphill while others have crested and are on the downhill run.
Transnet, long regarded by the bulk commodities industries as the main bottleneck in their export value chain, has become more flexible about the ports it can rail manganese ore through as its steps up rail capacity.
So far, it has trebled output to 15.1-million tonnes this year from five million tonnes in 2012 at a cost of about R2.9bn by adopting this model instead of spending R29bn in expanding just the traditional manganese route to Port Elizabeth.
Transnet will now move 23,625 tonnes of manganese per train, up from the 19,656 tonnes on the 312 wagons it normally used for manganese exports.
Seven slots a week on the 861km long Sishen-to-Saldanha line are reserved for manganese and 42 slots for iron ore.
“We’ve spent basically zero on this project. All we did was lengthen the train and used the same resources. We will move an extra million tonnes a year to Saldanha, which equates to at least a billion rand extra to the economy,” Lloyd Tobias, the freight rail division's acting CEO, said in an interview.
Transnet will bump up its capacity for manganese exports through Saldanha by one-million tonnes to 5.3-million tonnes, said Tobias, giving its ten manganese clients a second major port from which to sell their ore.
At Saldanha, Transnet will use the multi-product terminal and mobile ship loaders to move the manganese ore, keeping two offsite storage yards within a 5km and 10km radius respectively to truck ore to the port as needed, he said.
Port Elizabeth on the east coast remains the main manganese export channel with nine-million tonnes of capacity, a number Transnet wants to increase by at least 800,000 tonnes in the future, he said.
One of the concerns for Indian resources giant Vedanta, which has the Gamsberg zinc mine in the Northern Cape, and Orion Minerals, which is restarting the Prieska zinc and copper mine, is how to export their zinc.
Transnet was in talks with these two companies about various options to move zinc on rail, the most environmentally friendly choice when compared to trucking, said Tobias, adding the lessons learnt in rapidly growing the manganese capacity would be applied to zinc.
Transnet is also moving towards the automation of its long-haul bulk lines in line with developments around the world, most notably at Rio Tinto’s driverless train iron ore operations in Australia, but it would keep a driver on board no matter how automated the locomotives become, Tobias said.
Transnet has already deployed a high-level of technology on the Sishen-Saldanha line to monitor trains in great detail. It would in the next five years move to greater automation of the trains, removing the need for a second person in the driver’s cab.
“We have defined a route we want to follow on automation and we want to push the boundaries, especially on the iron ore line,” Tobias said.
“We are possibly looking at auto-cruise in the next five years. It’s like the auto-cruise in your car. Ultimately, we’ll have a fully automated train with a driver on board. We don’t want a situation where we don’t have anybody on board at that time,” he said.
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