Doubling Of Ressano Garcia Line To Conclude By March

Doubling Of Ressano Garcia Line To Conclude By March

Maputo, 19 Dec (AIM) – The work to double the Ressano Garcia railway line, which links the port of Maputo to South Africa, will be concluded by March next year.

The work, which began this year, includes construction of a second line from Matola-Gare, in the municipality of Matola, to the Secogene region in Moamba, about 60 kilometres north of the capital.

A source from the Board of Directors of the publicly-owned Ports and Railway Company (CFM), cited in Mondays issue of the Maputo daily “Notícias”, said that during completion of this work, the company expects to build three bridges, each about 80 meters long, to provide greater security and capacity to the line.

Without revealing how much doubling the line will cost, the source said that the work in progress will increase the capacity of the Ressano Garcia line from 15 million to about 20 million tonnes of cargo per year.

In recent years, CFM has concentrated major investments not only in the improvement of infrastructure, but also in the acquisition of rolling stock in order to increase the flow capacity of the various types of cargo that need to move through Mozambican ports.

Thus, CFM recently announced the acquisition of 300 wagons, 100 of which are destined for the central railway system, where the company was preparing to meet the demand, in terms of transporting wheat to Malawi and coal from Moatize, in Tete.

In the southern railway system, where the remaining newly acquired wagons have been allocated, CFM is particularly concerned to meet the needs of the Goba line, which connects the Port of Maputo to Eswatini.

This year, CFM signed an agreement with its Eswatini counterpart for the removal of railway borders, which allows trains from the two countries to circulate without having to change locomotives at the borders.

Another important agreement that forced the company to reposition rolling stock concerns the transport of coal from Botswana to the Port of Maputo. At first, the rolling stock used for this was only from Botswana, but according to CFM’s source, the Mozambican company saw this agreement as an opportunity to increase its transport capacity.

“In addition to these, we are investing in other means such as, for example, platform wagons because we want to win the transport of containers, in both the Southern and Central systems”, the source said.
(AIM)
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