Railway engineering company TMH Africa planned to use its new 45 000 m2 rolling stock manufacturing facility, in Boksburg, to serve the country and the continent, TMH Africa CEO Jerome Boyet said during a media tour of the facility last month.
The company unveiled the facility in April, after acquiring it in 2018.
As previously reported by Engineering News, the facility has been around since 1911, making it a legacy plant and a hub with plenty of engineering skills available for leverage.
The facility manufactures and assembles rolling stock, as well as refurbishes old locomotives and provides maintenance services.
Boyet indicated that the facility formed part of the Russian group’s $300-million, or R4.3-billion, investment in select countries across the world to expand its operations.
He explained that the group’s investment in South Africa was undertaken for three key reasons. The first was that the country had the political willingness to continue rail development and rail activity, which was not the case in many other countries in the world.
Secondly, he highlighted the country’s industrial capacity and its depth of technical capacity, which provided an enabling environment necessary for advanced train manufacturing.
Lastly, he noted that Africa was widely using narrow-gauge rail technologies, and the facility in South Africa would create the capacity for those skills to serve the group’s customers globally.