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African Railways news

465K views 2K replies 179 participants last post by  NicSA 
#1 ·
Hi guys i thought of starting this thread to cover all the railway construction news across the mother continent! Here in should be strict railway news with time frame and NOT i repeat AND NOT proposed projects without time frame and funds secured! You are most welcome...lets the game begin :lol:
 
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#2,337 ·
Egypt: Foreigners Will Be Required to Pay Train Tickets in USD, EUR: Minister of Transport

Foreigners will be required to pay train tickets in either the United States’ dollar or euro starting January 2023, announced Minister of Transport Kamel al-Wazir on 25 December.

Initially, the only trains which required foreign currency payments were sleep-in trains. Al-Wazir observed that over one thousand of these tickets were purchased in the past week alone.

He argued that this new decision would enable the ministry to financially support the new railcars, train engines, and maintenance of new transport systems in Egypt, including deals signed with international companies.

“[That way] we can prevent tourists from needing to exchange currency on the black market, while also making it easier for them to pay for transport,” al-Wazir expressed in a call-in on Al-Hekaya (The Story) with Amr Adib. “We buy these [train systems] in dollars, not Egyptian pounds […] instead of being a burden on the Central Bank, we’re trying to collect a part of our budget in dollars in order to fund these trains.”

“We’re not going to take [dollars] from Egyptians, we’re asking foreigners who already are coming into the country with foreign currency. Before we made this decision, we consulted with and took permission from the government as a whole; I’m just a minister, I cannot make these kinds of decisions in a vacuum.”

This announcement comes with al-Wazir’s inauguration of the first luxury passenger trains in Egypt, known as the Talgo. The minister stressed that the investment in long-distance transportation is a step forward to providing Egypt with a more efficient and streamlined train network.


 
#2,338 ·
hm. Does the Egyptian Railways want more direct inflow of USD and €?

delightful little snub towards the old colonizers Britain that the GBP isn't one of the approved currencies :D
 
#2,339 ·
Most people are quite perplexed over this, the number of foreigners who use public transport in Egypt is negligible so the inflow of USD/EUR from this move would be meaningless and they would have already brought that currency into Egypt in the first place to exchange for EGP. Maybe a nudge by the government to create speculation? Very dangerous move nonetheless and probably illegal.
 
#2,341 ·
Looks like a really good quality service. North Africa is in a different league when it comes to some of its passenger rail services. Morocco, Algeria and now increasingly Egypt too. Not only better than the rest of Africa but a lot better than North America too. I believe Morocco is the only lower-middle income country in the world to successfully implement real HSR so far.
 
#2,343 ·
That belongs in a Japanese HSR thread, not in the Africa thread?
 
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#2,344 ·
SA Minerals Council demands urgent action on Transnet's 'tragic decline', wants CEO Portia Derby axed

The Minerals Council South Africa demanded last month that Transnet take urgent action - including firing CEO Portia Derby - to arrest the decline of the state-owned freight and logistics company.

In a confidential letter sent by the council's president Nolitha Fakude to Transnet chairperson Popo Molefe on 4 December, seen by News24, the council called for the board to take over management of Transnet as part of its calls for drastic action to arrest an operational decline.

Transnet's poor rail performance is causing billions in lost revenue for bulk commodity miners, while issues at certain Transnet ports are also adversely affecting mining and other industries.

The council, in its letter, called for both Transnet group CEO and CEO of Transnet Freight Rail – Derby and Sizakele Mzimela – to be removed and replaced with properly qualified and experienced rail freight leaders.

"For more than 24 months, we have given the benefit of the doubt to the Transnet management team, who have aptly demonstrated, through several bizarre decisions and statements and in particular the ongoing tragic decline in the performance of Transnet, that they cannot resolve the crisis and are not capable of turning around the performance. We are insisting on the critical need for urgent change," the council's letter said.

The mining body also warned that action must be swift as Transnet could soon face liquidation.

"Given that Transnet SOC’s operating performance is deteriorating, we cannot see how the company will avoid breaching its debt covenants early in 2023, at which stage the directors of Transnet SOC will need to place the company into liquidation or risk being sued for trading recklessly," said the letter. "The bulk commodity mining companies that are members of the Minerals Council are now demanding urgent action on this crisis, as it is now posing an existential crisis for Transnet and for the mining companies."

 
#2,348 ·
Zambia using rail links to import fuel:
Zambia eyes fuel imports from neighbouring Angola
Zambia plans to import fuel from its oil-producing neighbour Angola in the government’s push to lower pump prices and stem supply shocks

Arnaldo Vieira, The East African

January 13, 2023
ZAMBIAOIL AND GAS
Zambia plans to import fuel from its oil-producing neighbour Angola in the government’s push to lower pump prices and stem supply shocks.

Zambia has agreed to buy a stake in Angola’s Lobito refinery in Benguela Province along the Atlantic Coast. President Hakainde Hichilema, during his three-day visit to Angola, assured his host that his country would invest in the Lobito refinery that is under construction."It makes no sense to import fuel from other parts of the world when we have a neighbouring producer," President Hichilema told journalists at a press conference in the capital Luanda after a meeting with President João Lourenço."I don't know how we have managed to maintain this situation of buying fuel from Saudi Arabia and other parts of the world and not from our neighbour," he added.

President Hichilema arrived in Luanda Tuesday and will visit the refinery in Benguela on Thursday and the Lobito corridor, consisting of railroad and port, offering the shortest route linking Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo's key mining regions to the Atlantic Coast.

In July, the Angola government signed a 30-year concession with a consortium of Trafigura, Mota-Engil Engineering and Construction Africa, and Vecturis, Belgium, to operate rail services and offer logistical support for the Lobito corridor.

The rail line runs approximately 1290km from Luau on the eastern border with DRC to the Lobito Port on the Atlantic.
Angola and Zambia are also conducting a feasibility study for a proposed oil pipeline from the Lobito refinery to Lusaka.

President Lourenço said the refinery construction is expected to be concluded in 2026."It is very natural that Zambia, as our neighbour, has a great interest in acquiring these fuels in Angola, in the neighbouring country, especially when Angola has a greater capacity to refine the crude oil it extracts," President Lourenço said.

The refinery is projected to process up to 200,000 barrels per day when completed. According to a proposed governance structure, private investors, including Zambia, will own 70 percent of the refinery, with Angola state oil firm Sonangol controlling a 30 percent stake. © Copyright 2022 Nation Media Group. All Rights Reserved. Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info).


I forgot how convenient Zambia's borders are for trade. I'm glad they're expanding their rail network.
 
#2,350 ·
South Africa’s disintegrating freight railway is crippling firms

The roads in the north of Kwa-Zulu Natal (kzn), South Africa’s second-most-populated province, were once sedate. Lorries carrying timber or sugar cane from nearby plantations would trundle past, overtaken occasionally by tourists heading to game reserves. But these days hundreds of trucks laden with coal roar through small towns on their way to the port of Richards Bay. In September one lorry rammed into a pickup in the oncoming lane, killing 20 passengers near the town of Pongola. “Our roads aren’t meant for this amount of traffic,” says Mike Patterson, from the local chamber of commerce. “The coal should be taken by rail.”

Indeed it should. But South Africa’s freight rail network is in such bad shape that firms are struggling to move their goods. In 2017 trains hauled 81m tonnes of coal to export terminals. This year about 54m tonnes will go that way; lorries will carry only another 9m. The decline reflects a missed opportunity: international coal prices soared last year after Russia invaded Ukraine. The gap between what they can dig and what they can export represents a loss of 80bn rand ($4.7bn) for coal miners, estimates Jan Havenga of Stellenbosch University. Other miners and manufacturers report similar deficits. The total hit to South African firms from lost exports and the extra costs of going by road will amount to about 400bn rand in 2022 (6% of gdp), says Mr Havenga.

Many people, including those outside South Africa, have heard of Eskom, the state-owned electricity utility with a market niche in keeping homes dark. Transnet, a less familiar state-owned enterprise (soe) which operates the freight rail network, as well as ports and pipelines, is a similar mess. And its woes are just as consequential for South Africa’s economy—and that of the wider region. So worried are miners, the industry most dependent on Transnet, that in December their lobby group asked its board to sack its boss, Portia Derby, warning that the firm faced bankruptcy. (She remains in her job.)



Train geeks will happily tell you all the historical reasons why running South Africa’s rail network is not an easy task. In the 19th century British colonists laid “Cape gauge” railways to get diamonds and gold out of the hinterland. This narrow gauge was fine when the alternative was an ox wagon. But today most other countries have wider gauges and as a result their trains can carry heavier loads. In the 20th century during apartheid, or white rule, governments indulged farmers by building a dense but uneconomical network that stretched to remote rural areas with little freight traffic. Today South Africa has 0.6% of global gdp but 2% of the world’s rail network. It has about half of all the kilometres of rail in sub-Saharan Africa. All of it requires upkeep.

When it came to power in 1994 the African National Congress (anc) took over the supervision of Transnet, which four years earlier had been carved out of the Department of Transport. Transnet veterans advised the new government to allow the company to let rural lines rust and focus on the profitable coal and iron-ore railways. The anc declined to do so. Instead Transnet eventually showed the typical characteristics of state firms under the ruling party: neglect, patronage and corruption.

 
#2,354 ·
Transnet wants to hand over its key Durban to Joburg line – complete with 3,573 staff

Between the port of Durban, where the ships are, and the south of Johannesburg, the gateway to Gauteng's consumers and factories, there is a 670km run of double-track electrified rail.

At the one end is Bayhead, the "back of port" terminal for the Durban harbour, which is constantly looking to expand its freight-handling capability. At the other are the City Deep and nearby Kascon terminals, which can supposedly deal with 650,000 shipping containers per year.

That container corridor should be busy as hell, says owner Transnet, given the somewhat mind-boggling amount of stuff that needs to be moved between Durban and Johannesburg. But in recent years usage has slumped while the time it takes Transnet to move a train from one end to the other went from 28 hours to 37 hours, and customers demanded certainty about when their containers would arrive.

The operation is "not performing optimally", Transnet says in documents that describe its latest plan: to bring in a private partner to fix the corridor.

Last week, Transnet started the search for someone to take over the whole thing and run it for 20 years.

A successful partner will probably need at least R5.5 billion in working and investment capital, Transnet reckons – and it will be expected to take on the 3,573 staff currently dedicated to running the corridor, along with assets such as 419 locomotives.

Transnet estimates that 87% of containers are moved by road in South Africa – but believes rail should have close to a third of the market share. By some metrics, it thinks it can increase the number of containers on trains tenfold.

That would hold implications for a large section of the country, with fewer trucks on the N3, faster operations at the Durban port, and smoother logistics for both importers and exporters.

But achieving that would mean reversing a long-running trend, which Transnet itself has failed to do. It lacks the money necessary to invest in the operation, Transnet has told potential partners, but its numbers also point to many different types of trouble on the line.

The corridor can, in theory, carry 47 trains in each direction every day – when the system is not damaged due to flood or theft, both of which have recently hit it.

Right now, Transnet says, it is using about half the theoretical capacity of the line, split just about equally between passenger trains, general freight trains, and container-carrying trains.

 
#2,358 ·
Ethiopia’s Chinese-built railway creates a $60 million headache

The Chinese-built light rail network in Ethiopia’s capital is on the brink of collapse, with only a fifth of its trains still in service seven years after its launch.

Only eight of the line’s 41 trains are operational and the network requires a revamp that would cost more than $60 million, according to the Addis Ababa Road and Transport Bureau. Those funds would be needed for maintenance of the trains and tracks to be carried out by engineers brought in from China.

Addis Ababa’s light rail line is one of China’s signature infrastructure projects in Africa. But, with limited and dwindling resources, most of its trains switched from daily services to running on alternate days in September with delayed repairs. Fears are growing that all trains might be suspended indefinitely.

Late last year, Exim Bank of China withheld a further loan of $339 million to Ethiopia due to the nation’s inability to pay its mounting infrastructure loans to the Asian nation, with many projects paused in the midst of foreign currency shortages and recurring conflicts.

The failure of the Addis Ababa train project raises the question of whether feasibility studies carried out ahead of the launch of such expensive projects are inadequate.

The Addis Ababa rail line was a poorly planned and executed project that went ahead for purely political reasons and was destined to fail, according to Alemayehu Geda, an economist at Addis Ababa University who has researched the China-Africa relationship.

“In Ethiopia, as well as in other African nations, we often show poor negotiation skills when we deal with such loans, as well as on our implementations later on,” he said. “In particular with the local light rail, they lack spare parts as well as foreign exchange to import parts and they need about $60 million to bring them to a certain standard.”

The fact that maintenance is only carried out by Chinese engineers also means knowledge and skills aren’t being transferred to locals, said Alemayehu, which means locals aren’t developing the expertise needed to fix problems and generate jobs.

Eric Olander, editor-in-chief of the China-Global South Project, said it was a good idea to build the railway and criticism over its shortcomings are unwarranted.

“As African cities like Addis get bigger, it becomes ever more important to be able to move people around quickly and efficiently,” he said. “Getting the Chinese to build the railway line was the easy part, managing it for the next 50 plus years is already proving difficult and will serve as a critical test for the government.”

The failure of the rail network would “send a message to the markets that lending money to Ethiopia is a risky investment if they can’t effectively run the projects they have already built”, said Olander.

 
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