Reports rural Queensland was uneasy with Premier Anna Bligh’s decision to sell off part of the Queensland rail network proliferated headlines as regional communities debated the implications of rail closures on their towns and livelihoods.
The announcement came at a time when QR was struggling to meet commitments to its grain and livestock customer base, forcing vast volumes of freight onto the back of trucks in the absence of trains.
QR faced widespread criticism for irregular stop-start services as AgForce joined with many shire councils to question QR’s commitment to agriculture in general.
QR’s Queensland regional rail network suffered under the weight of too much work, as did its customers, chief executive Lance Hockridge told Lloyd’s List DCN.
“I acknowledge that we have not kept up with demand,” Hockridge said.
“And I also acknowledge that at times, we did not do a good enough job of communicating with our customer base about what was going on.
“The reality is we’ve had this coincidence of events, where on one hand, the demand is at record levels and on the other, we’ve got issues around capability.”
With bulk markets in grain, livestock and coal running hot and with the regional rail network markedly under-resourced by loco power, the rail service was stretched beyond its capability, Hockridge said.
“Typically, in both the livestock and the grain arena, you only have one good year every five or every ten,” he said.
“The demand in those areas [this year] is somewhere between five and ten times as much as it has been in recent years.
“The dilemma that faces both us and our customers is whether there is hiding, somewhere out there in the western plains, sufficient capacity in reserve, as it were, to be able to meet the peak years or whether, more sensibly, we man up – both with respect to the hardware and with respect to the labour requirements – for what might be anticipated as a more normal year, whatever that is.”
QR did what was believed to be sensible it planned to accommodate the rule rather than the exception, Hockridge said. That is, it reduced the capital invested in the regional bulk businesses to a level which more approximated an average year.
“Inevitably that means that in years like this – a flat out year – we were always going to be struggling to keep up,” he said.
“We have put together every string of wagons and every piece of locomotive capability that we can to keep up, and we’ve been talking to our customers…about what makes sense. We are alive to doing what our customers would have us do.
“As [Transport] Minister Rachel Nolan said, we are not a charity.”
Rural lobby groups used the sale announcement and the poor service performance to put pressure on the government and on QR to do that which was “uneconomic” that is, to put in place a series of arrangements which would effectively represent a subsidy, Hockridge said.
“Whether there is or should be a subsidy is a fair question. But it’s a question for the government, in terms of what the social and economic policy for the state is,” he said.
“For QR, we are a commercial organisation. We…fully accept that does not mean commerciality in its absolute most brutal form,” Hockridge said, adding that QR was conscious of its impacts on the community and on employment.
“We have got to be conscious of what the medium and long-term demand is for our services.”
Over recent weeks QR has put more loco power back into service after maintenance schedules and a number of level crossing accidents took the locomotives out of action.
“They are not large numbers but even if you lose four to six locos from your fleet at a time when you are struggling. Anyway, all of these things tend to feed on themselves,” Hockridge said.
“Inevitably, given everything we’ve described, we are hand-to-mouth, so any hiccups are keenly felt. We certainly recognise the need to keep our customer base better informed of what we’re up to.”
Source: Lloyd’s List Daily Commercial News – www.lloydslistdcn.com.au
 
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