Rail's pressing needs

Russell Stokes, CEO of GE Transportation

WHILE train commuters to Soweto still debate the safety of the signalling system that has seen two crashes since April, ‘CNN Marketplace Africa’ this week hosted Russell Stokes, CEO of GE Transportation on what needs to be done for the rail industry in Africa.

GE Transportation was recently contracted to make over 230 new locomotives for South Africa, and it has similar deals in place for Mozambique and Angola.

Stokes told CNN Marketplace Africa he deemed expanding tracks and ensuring maintenance ability
to be the rail industry in South Africa’s most pressing needs

“Ultimately, even to be able to run a locomotive, you need good track. So what you’re seeing right now is a big investment in some of the different countries, in terms of putting in that actual track infrastructure.”

He expand on this, telling ‘Marketplace Africa’: “Then you also have to make sure that if you’re selling a locomotive in country that you can service and take care of it. So you need to make sure that you’re putting money into the maintenance facilities, the sheds, the support infrastructure, to be able to service them and keep them running.”

Stokes told CNN his company estimated the new railway infrastructure will create 5 000 jobs across the extended supply chain in South Africa, specifically.

He confirmed CNN’s view that GE invests in countries’ rail infrastructure if they had natural resources to export and government regulation that backed this.

Repeating his views expressed last year told the media at Forbes’ Reinventing America conference, Stokes said trains offer the most cost effective mode of transport.

He told CNN the trucks by road were almost 70% more expensive than locomotives on rail.

“I travel globally, obviously, we have a customer in Kazakhstan, a number of customers in that market, that are working together — the Chinese, the Kazaks, the Russians, and the Latvians, or Lithuanians — that are trying to figure out how to connect from the western coast of China all the way through into Europe.

“What they do now is they actually take boats that take 45 days coming down under South Africa to get over into Europe. If they can go across the road, they think they can do it in 15 days.

He stressed it was not good enough to hammer in rails and sell trains. GE is selling a movement planning system similar to what air traffic controllers use to ensure trains arrive on time where they are supposed to be. 

 This has however created its own problems in the nuts-and-bolt world of rail.

In a May interview with Ad Magazine Kristi Lundgren, marketing leader at GE Transportation said the change from selling to engineers to selling to the IT department was a big challenge. “We were used to selling to the chief mechanical officer

— he had been our go-to guy,” Ms. Lundgren said. “Now, we are talking to the CIO. What do we say to him? It was a bit of a marketing challenge.”

In South Africa, GE competes head on with Bombardier, who built the Gautrain and it currently in a three-year project to modernise signalling along over 200 km of track in eThekwini to speed up the commute of some 70 000 passengers.
(First published in Witness Wheels)