Kenya Railways has deployed double-stack cargo trains to improve daily cargo evacuation and efficiency from the Port of Mombasa to the Inland Container Depot in Nairobi. Each train has a capacity of moving a minimum of 154 Twenty Foot Equivalent Units (TEUs).
This comes in the wake of increased delay in cargo handling at the Port of Mombasa, which Shippers Council of East Africa said was hurting manufacturers importing raw materials.
There is an increased number of ships calling at the Port of Mombasa as international trade picks up after last year’s interruption by the Covid-19 pandemic.
This is evidenced by the increased custom collection, largely generated from the port, with the Southern region collecting Sh 200.95 billion to surpass a target of Sh 183.578 billion in the half financial year ending in December 2020.
In December 2020 alone, the Customs & Border Control (C&BC) Department recorded the highest ever monthly revenue collection in KRA’s history by collecting Kshs 60.777 billion reflecting a growth of 40.9% and registering a revenue surplus of Kshs 12.191 billion.
By last week, there were 1,496 TEUs awaiting rail evacuation to the Nairobi Inland Container Depot, with four vessels discharging 2,795 containers.
According to SCEA, which represents importers, exporters, transporters and the logistic chain in the region, inefficiencies leading to delays may see an increase in freight rates and penalties by shipping lines.
To improve freight services, the shippers want Kenya Railways to increase the number of Standard Gauge Railway freight trains to at least 15, from the current average of eight. Kenya Railways operates an average 11 trains currently.
KRC has also re-commissioned 518 wagons which had been damaged during loading and unloading. The wagons have been attended to and back to full operations enabling daily average supply to the port of above 400 wagons for loading per day, according to KR.
Of the 490 high sided wagons initially dedicated to conventional cargo, 282 have been converted to load containerised cargo adding to daily available fleet.
Work is in progress to complete conversion of 208 more for additional utility on containers loading export goods. Kenya Railways is also building 330 wagons as part of its expansion plan for the cargo business.
Cargo volume through the port of Mombasa has been on rise. In 2019, the Mombasa port’s overall throughput rose to 34.44 million tonnes in 2019, up from 30.92 million the previous year, marking a growth of 11.4 per cent.
The performance was supported by improved efficiency and speedy evacuation of cargo on the Standard Gauge Railway(SGR) to the ICD in Nairobi.
Data by KPA showed that in 2019, the ICD in Nairobi handled 418,830 TEUs, representing a 62.4 per cent growth compared to 257,972 in 2018. In the same period, 4,225 trains were handled at the ICD, consisting of 2,668 import trains and 1,587 export ones.
Latest data by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) shows that the volume of goods hauled by trains on the SGR remained stable in the first half of the year, boosting earnings despite economic disruption due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
About 1.98 million tonnes of cargo was carried on the SGR between January and June, a slight decline from the 2.20 million tonnes moved in a similar period of 2019.
Earnings from cargo services on the SGR were steady in the six months to June, hitting Sh5.53million compared to the Sh5.63 million netted in a similar period.
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