Kenya Railways Corporation cargo train (photo / the east African)
Kenya Railways managing director Atanas Maina has said the the second Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) freight train will not arrive in Nairobi today as scheduled but will instead arrive on Thursday because of a volume shortfall.
“The second cargo train which was expected to arrive in Nairobi today from Mombasa will arrive tomorrow because it is not full,” Mr Maina said.
The train was expected to arrive in Nairobi from the port of Mombasa this Wednesday evening.
On Monday, the inaugural historic train arrived at the Embakasi Inland Container Depot (ICD), with 140 containers on board.
The corporation is expected to run trains with 54 double-stack flat wagons each, carrying a total of 216 twenty foot containers when filled to capacity. The total carriage load of the train is expected to be 4000 tonnes.
The Nairobi ICD has been expanded to 450,000 twenty foot equivalent units from 180,000 twenty foot equivalent units.
According to Business daily, The government gave Kenya Railways a target of transporting 6 million tonnes of load to the Nairobi ICD.
The trains will move at a speed of 80km/h taking 8 hours between the two cities with a 70 tonne load. It is also expected to reduce the cost of transportation of the load by half.