Rail, Option For Road Affreightment

Developing goods transport by rail in Sri Lanka is a slow process when considering the fact that over 90% of inland goods transport are done by road.
Making the island ‘s rail transportation system work for goods transport requires the cooperation of the service provider, ie the Government owned Sri Lanka Railway (SLR) and the supplier, the private sector.
One  middleman, or shall I say the middlewoman who is taking an interest  in this whole process is Ms. Niroza  Gazali, CEO SG Logistics (Pvt.) Ltd., a freight forwarder and the local agent of DB Schenker, a German freight forwarder.
SG Logistics is part of the Expolanka Group.
Gazali was responsible for getting back on track SLR’s flat bed trailers that can carry 20 foot containers, and which previously were lying idle in SLR’s yards possibly for years. “It was an experiment that began last year,” Gazali told this reporter recently.
“Our client was a contractor involved in a housing project in Galle. The imported fittings and cement where they had been transported in 20 ft. containers by sea were then shipped to SLR’s yard in Colombo for rail transport to Galle,” she said. Unfortunately, the lifter that was to be used to unload the containers on to the flatbed rail trailers broke down and the operation could not proceed, Gazali said.
“However the happy ending is that a lot of army logistics to the North since that failed experiment are now being transported on flatbed rail trailers to Vavuniya, the northern most tip in the island to which rail traffic at present extends up to, despite the failure of our’ virginal’ try, failure not due to the trailers or to the idea, but due to the lifter which broke down, with the army now proving that it’s practicable to move 20 ft. containers by rail,” she said.
“The public sector is generally looked at with disdain, but not so the SLR, or for that matter the state owned Colombo Commercial Fertiliser Ltd. (CCF) to which institution we handle their fertilizer transport by rail and whose officers, both SLR and CCF have been cooperative with me in this endeavour,”  said Gazali.
Fertliser for CCF is transported to distant places such as Batticaloa by train.
Prima uses parts of the rail transportation system to transport flour, the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation its oil (though not more than 10-15% of that commodity is transported by rail) and CCF its fertilizer, those are the few users of the rail transportation system for the movement of goods in the country.
“Rail transport is costlier than by road according to SLR’s present cost structure, but it’s far more environmentally friendly than road transportation,” said Gazali. It’s one train engine, transporting several goods as opposed to several trucks (engines) transporting the same weight of goods, she said. One of the major rail transportations that SG Logistics undertook was to transport 1,965 metric tons of nutritious food on behalf of the WFP to Vavuniya on a single trip, from where they were taken by trucks to Jaffna, soon after the war end last year.
“The end users were the refugees who were living in camps then,” said Gazali.  For inventory and logistical reasons the food stuff had to be first shipped to Jaffna, after which they were distributed to the refugees living in various camps in the North. Some 43 train wagons were used for this purpose, whereas if lorries carrying 20 ft. containers were used, then the requirement would have had been for 89 lorries, as opposed to one rail engine .
The carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere, in such an operation, in a developed country , according to calculations,would have had amounted to 0.83 metric tons (MTs) for a train engine, whereas, cumulatively, by using trucks it would have had been more than 40 times higher at 35.68 MTs.  “But our trucks are not world class, so the CO2 emitted to the atmosphere if this transport had been done by road and not by rail would have had been more than 35.68 MTs,” said Gazali.
“The loss we made was Rs. 100,000; which is not bad for a virginal experiment of this size. However it could not be continued as this was one of WFP’s last programmes of this nature here,” she said.
“If we can break even, then it’s worth the exercise and the few experiments that we have done in this sphere, have shown that it’s possible to break even,” said Gazali.
Another trial  that Gazali tried, and was successful was transporting low grown tea by rail to Colombo from Galle. “Special trolleys costing between Rs. 35-40,000 per trolley built at our expense were used in this experiment to load the teas to the wagons to avoid double handling. It was a million rupees worth of teas and only one train wagon was used in the trial, it was successful, but the challenge is to ensure that there are a regular number of train wagons available to transport teas to Colombo for onward shipment overseas on a daily basis,” said Gazali.
“We are working with SLR and the trade on that score,” she said.
But the development of rail transportation for goods here has a long way to go. For instance if one considers the import-export business, there needs to be customs verification points, though there are rail tracks that go right into Colombo Port. In neighbouring India, the Nava Shiva Port in Mumbai is directly linked to New Delhi for goods transport by rail for ocean freight and vice versa, she said.
However goods transportation by rail to the hills may not be sustainable because of the distances involved, said Gazali. The rail tracks go round the mountains and not through the mountains which is the case in most developed countries, as such the distances to be covered may be too long for rail transport of goods to the hill country to make business sense, said Gazali.
The need is to have more train engines. At present the rail system is for passenger transport, while goods transport is secondary. But this problem could be mitigated if SLR has more train engines, she said.