South Africa’s push to drive freight and commodities from road to rail depends on strategic intermodal partnerships, Transchem Logistics’ Alec Masianoga said on Wednesday.
Speaking at the Sara Rail conference, in Midrand, he indicated that intermodalism was key to accelerating State-owned freight group Transnet’s road-to-rail migration and he questioned what stakeholders were doing to further this aim.
Intermodalism would reduce the overall transport costs, increase economic activity, ease the burden on the highways – with one train replacing 280 trucks – increase safety and deliver higher returns from public and private investments.
Further, leveraging intermodal partnerships delivered transit times comparable with that of road-only options and reduced the cost of doing business, but industry needed to identify and understand the volumes that could be transported intermodally and work together to enable interoperability and interconnection through the design and expansion of new technologies and infrastructure, Masianoga said.
His comments followed a memorandum of understanding between Transnet Freight Rail and Imperial Logistics earlier this year to facilitate the development of multimodal logistics services, targeting existing volumes within their respective groups and across various industries.
This was just one example of structured collaboration between stakeholders, with 70% of road hauliers indicating their willingness to explore intermodal opportunities, Masianoga said, adding that intermodal programmes should actually be a macroeconomic priority in future.