South Africa is about to let private companies run freight trains on the national rail network for the first time. The network itself, it turns out, is asking for R26 billion to be made fit for them. Transnet Rail Infrastructure Manager (TRIM), the Transnet division that now owns the job of maintaining the tracks and selling access to them, has applied to National Treasury for another R26bn in grant funding to rehabilitate the lines, Business Day reported on 21 September, citing figures in TRIM’s final network statement.
That is on top of R10bn TRIM has already been awarded. The money would come from the Budget Facility for Infrastructure (BFI), Treasury’s structured process for funding large public infrastructure projects, in which a project has to pass an appraisal before it gets a budget allocation rather than simply being added to a department’s baseline.
Where the R26bn would go
The request is split by corridor. Applications for the Cape corridor (R8.7bn) and the Central corridor (R6bn) were submitted on 5 July 2026. Two more, for the North East corridor (about R5.4bn) and the Container corridor (about R6bn), are being prepared for a 15 October deadline. Together they come to roughly R26bn, which is the figure TRIM is chasing.
The wider five-year programme set out in the network statement totals R46.34bn: R32.7bn in operating expenditure, R11.9bn in sustaining capital (spending to keep existing assets working) and R1.7bn in expansion capital (spending to add new capacity). The proportions tell their own story. Less than R2bn of R46bn is for growth. The rest is about stopping the decline and holding the line.
What the network is carrying, and what it used to
The reason is visible in the tonnages. Transnet Freight Rail moved 167.9 million tonnes in 2025/26, up 4.9% from 160.1 million tonnes the year before, according to Mining Weekly. That was a genuine improvement, and it still missed the 180 million tonne target for the year. It also leaves the railway roughly 54 million tonnes short of the 221.8 million tonnes it carried in 2017/18. TRIM itself attributes the condition of the network to “visible deterioration due to prolonged under-investment, theft and vandalism”. On the Central corridor alone, the network statement records an average of nine theft and vandalism incidents a day in the third quarter of 2025/26.
The stated target is 250 million tonnes of operating capacity by 2030. Getting there from 167.9 million means adding more freight in four years than the network has lost in eight.
The private operators waiting at the platform
This is where the funding request stops being an internal Transnet matter. Eleven private train operating companies have concluded access agreements with TRIM, and together they are expected to add 24 million tonnes of capacity across five corridors covering coal, manganese, containers, fuel and general freight. The first of them are expected to start pilot runs before the end of 2026, with others entering the mainline network from 2027. We covered the plan for test trains before the end of the year earlier this month.
The rules those operators will run under were settled this month. Version 4 of the network statement, published in Gazette No. 55426 and governing the 2026/27 and 2027/28 financial years, extends access contracts from 10 to 15 years, including for the first operators, and introduces an “ad hoc” method for releasing train slots when capacity frees up for shorter periods. TRIM chief executive Moshe Motlohi said the changes would give “increased regulatory certainty and confidence for current and future rail market participants”. The document is on TRIM’s network statement page.
A 15-year contract is a real commitment for a private operator buying locomotives and wagons. It is also, quietly, a commitment by the state that the track under those wagons will be in a condition worth paying for over the same period. The R26bn application is the price tag for keeping that second promise.
What is confirmed, and what is not
The funding figures and corridor split come from TRIM’s own network statement, as reported. The applications are requests, not awards: National Treasury has not publicly said whether it will fund them, and the North East and Container applications have not yet been submitted. The 24 million tonnes attributed to the private operators is an expectation, not a measured result, since none of them has yet run a commercial train on the mainline.
Who should be watching
Bulk exporters are the obvious audience: coal and manganese producers have spent years sending ore to port by road because the railway could not take it, at a higher cost per tonne and with more wear on the national road network. But the effects run further down the chain. Smaller mines, agricultural exporters and freight forwarders price their contracts on how reliably goods reach the ports, and road hauliers have built businesses on rail’s failure. Anyone starting a trucking business or planning to export should treat a working railway as a real possibility again by the end of the decade, not a background assumption that it will stay broken.
For now, the tracks are open, the operators are signed, the rules are gazetted. The only piece still missing is the one that costs R26bn.
