Africa
Coal to power Botswanan revival?
Huge and largely untapped coal reserves look set to revive the fortunes of Botswana Railways which until recently had been staring extinction in the face, as Paul Ash discovers.
T 26
HERE was a small but telling moment at a recent handover of new salt wagons to Botswana Railways (BR) when the Transport and Communications Ministry’s permanent secretary, Mr Thato Raphaka, told railway managers: “I urge you to look after these goods jealously.” In most countries, Botswana included, the arrival of new wagons would go largely unnoticed, and certainly without the fanfare of an official handover. But the delivery of the batch of 160 salt hoppers from South Africa last December demonstrates that the troubles which almost crippled the small state-owned railway are fast becoming a memory. A decade ago BR was in turmoil. For
much of the 20th century, the 640km- long main line, from Mafikeng, South Africa to the Botswana/Zimbabwe border at Plumtree, was little more than a struggling, underfunded, transit railway. Transit traffic peaked at 1.1 million tonnes in 1999, according to a USAid report in 2000. By 2005, this traffic had slumped to a reported 150,000 tonnes. The rest had been lost to the privately-operated Beit Bridge Railway (BBR), which offers a more direct route from South Africa to the rail hub in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, bypassing Botswana.
Passenger services were also
struggling despite investment in new rolling stock following the takeover of the railway from National Railways of
Zimbabwe by the Botswana government in 1987 and the formation of BR. After an initial expansion, services gradually dwindled and then stopped altogether in 2009. BR’s prospects were so bleak that by the middle of the last decade, brokers were regularly seen sniffing around the corridors at BR’s Mahalapye headquarters, hoping to snap up the railway’s locomotives for a song. “Those locomotives are basically new - and [BR] is hardly using them,” a visiting American railwayman noted at the time. It would have been an ignominious but not unexpected end for such a young railway. Transit traffic accounted for roughly half of BR’s tonnage according to the
IRJ July 2013
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