In the last financial year (2011/2012), Transnet spent an incredible R2.4 billion on repair and maintenance work to its freight rail system, said Public Enterprises Minister Malusi Gigaba.

According to Minister Gigaba, eradicating Transnet’s total maintenance and repair backlog was likely to take another 10 or so years.

“The current maintenance backlog has been accumulating over a period of 15 years, mainly due to a lack of funding owing to austerity measures of the time.”

“The eradication of the maintenance backlog is a lengthy process and has been projected to take approximately 10 years to eliminate, dependent on the availability of funds.”

Rail and sleeper replacement, bridges, points machines, remote control systems and ballast screening are just some of the areas in which the backlog is mostly made up of.

In the past year, there has been extensive repair, maintenance and upgrade work done by Transnet. Over 350, 000 old rail sleepers have been replaced with new ones, 7 bridges have been reconditioned and over R300 million was spent on replacing the signalling equipment alone.