The arrival of 20 locomotives from Freetown in Sierra Leone at the Port of Durban earlier this month marked the culmination of a complex logistics operation that involved rail, sea and road – and a lot of inter-regional co-operation. Owned by Grindrod, the locos had been contracted in 2012 to haul iron ore from Tonkilili Mine to Pepel Port in Sierra Leone. However, when mining operations came to a halt at the end of 2017, the counter party defaulted on their lease hire and maintenance payment obligations which is why the locomotives have been ‘repatriated’. And it was no easy task. Because the Port of Pepel is not deep enough to receive the large vessel required for the shipment and there is no railway line from Pepel to Freetown, all 24 locomotives were railed some 75 kms to a transhipment facility established close to the town of Lunsar. Here the body of each locomotive, weighing 72 tonnes, was lifted off their bogies by a mobile crane contracted from the neighbouring country of Guinea and loaded onto specialised trucks. From there they were transported indirectly, avoiding weak bridges and other obstacles for 200km on a mixture of tar and dirt roads, to Freetown Port where they were re-assembled with their bogies and subsequently loaded on a heavy lift project vessel for shipment to Matadi and Durban. The locomotives will be deployed into new contracts. A further four locomotives have already been delivered from the same vessel to a client in Matadi, DRC en-route to South Africa.
