The Railway Safety Regulator (RSR) has revealed a 6% decrease in security-related incidents but a 2% increase in operational safety-related occurrences on South Africa’s railways over the last year.

In the RSR’s 'State of Safety Report' for the 2021/22 financial year, released on October 25, the regulator noted that these statistics were recorded during a period of significantly lower rail use.

Since the 2019/20 and 2020/21 reporting periods, Covid-19 lockdowns had a significant impact on the railway performance, as well as the occurrence entries recorded, with virtually all usage metrics being lower than pre-pandemic figures.

Theft of assets contributed 80%, about 6 040 incidents, to the total security-related incidents for the year, with 17% of security incidents related to vandalism. Since 2010/11, however, there has been a 19% increase in the overall number of security-related incidents.

“Some of the security incidents have reduced because probably there's nothing more to steal. However, when there's nothing more to steal on the rest of the railway line, then we are going to start experiencing attempts on our infrastructure,” Gautrain Management Agency COO Tshepo Kgobe noted at the release of the report.

He said that, although numerous interventions had already been implemented, more was needed to properly address the problem of theft and vandalism. He said the only way forward was to invest in better technology and security infrastructure.

“We've identified the need to focus on investment in technology. If we're going to rely on human beings alone, we can't guard the whole 22 000 km of rail that we have. We have to use drones and other new technology to be able to significantly reduce security incidents. We will make a dent when we have better collaboration with the police and other law enforcement agencies, combined with the use of technology,” Kgobe said.

RSR CEO Tshepo Kgare explained that the rail policing arm had identified unused buildings, no or lack of security personnel, encroachment of the railway reserves and security not clearly being identified as part of the main drivers of railway-related criminal activities.

In terms of operational occurrences, the public were harmed in 79.6% of the events. However, few of these were passengers, who only made up 10% of all those harmed during operational occurrences. Overall, passengers were harm free in 95.68% of operational occurrences.

“This can be avoided. We are not too happy about these numbers,” RSR acting COO Molefi Freddie Kgomari said.

The report showed an 18% increase in level crossing occurrences between the 2020/21 and 2021/22 reporting periods. Ten fatalities and 54 injuries were recorded owing to level crossing occurrences during the year.

However, the 2020/21 reporting period recorded the lowest number of level crossing occurrences since the 2010/11 reporting period, so an increase could be expected.

There was a 64.1% increase in collisions between rolling stock on a running line but a 43% overall reduction since 2010/11. Overall, there was a 12% decrease in total train derailments year-on-year.

Meanwhile, whereas all train collisions during 2018/19 resulted in 26% of all harm since 2010/11, and 2019/20 only resulted in 2.5% of all harm, with those of 2020/21 coming in at 0.5%, collisions in 2021/22 only resulted in 0.2% overall harm.