Somebody has to own the rails, and somebody else can run the trains on them. South Africa spent decades with one company doing both, and that changed when Transnet's track was carved out into a separate business, the Transnet Rail Infrastructure Manager, or Trim. Trim looks after 20 953km of line, and Transnet Freight Rail is now simply the biggest operator on it.
Eleven private companies have signed rail access agreements with Trim to become the others. They were chosen in August 2025 out of 25 applicants, handed 41 routes across six corridors, and signed at a ceremony in Sandton on 13 May 2026. Most of them are miners and logistics firms: Grindrod, Menar Ports & Rail, African Rail Company, Minrail, Barberry, Sharp Logistics, Motheo Logistics, Interlinks, IRACEMA, The Railway Corporation and TLD Marine.
What it takes to put a train on the line
An access agreement is permission, not a timetable. Before an operator moves anything it needs a permit from the Railway Safety Regulator, rolling stock configured to Transnet's standards, and somewhere at the port to offload. Trim says some of the eleven are aiming to start before the end of 2026 and the rest during 2027. Menar has said it is buying locomotives and wagons to move coal, anthracite, manganese and ferromanganese on the 8.6 million tonnes it was allocated.
Trim chief executive Moshe Motlohi told Moneyweb that two operators are close, with their locomotives and wagons almost through assessment, and that they will run test trains before the calendar year is out. They will run short distances, a trip or two a day, well inside the slots they hold. He expects a third by the end of February 2027. None of the three has been named.
The bill for the track underneath them
The reason the state went looking for company is that the network has been going backwards. Cargo volumes have fallen by more than a third in five years to theft, vandalism and mismanagement, and the last time Transnet moved more than 200 million tonnes in a year was 2017. Transport Minister Barbara Creecy wants 250 million tonnes a year by 2030, from 167.9 million now.
Motlohi's office puts the cost of repairing the network at R70 billion over five years, money that neither Trim nor Transnet has, he told Moneyweb. His three routes to it are the access fees the new operators will pay for using the line, National Treasury's Budget Facility for Infrastructure, and debt raised in the capital markets.
The eleven are expected to add 24 million tonnes of capacity, scaling to 52 million over five years. Transnet has meanwhile posted its first profit in four years, R4.6 billion against a R1.9 billion loss. None of the eleven has run a commercial train yet.
