The State-owned Transnet Freight Rail will from this month rail eight 200-wagon Shongololo trains a day from the coalfields of Mpumalanga – double the previous four – to the private-sector-owned Richards Bay Coal Terminal. The Shongololo service, launched in July, has reduced locomotive cycle times from 58 hours to 41 hours and wagon cycle times from 63 hours to 48 hours, all in the interests of getting the rail capacity to rise to the port’s export capacity of 91-million tons of coal a year, which is loaded onto 730 ships a year. Currently, the rail line has a capacity of some 81-million tons a year and needs to transport another ten-million tons a year to meet the volume the port can take.