The governments of Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Botswana have agreed to invest $10 million in upgrading sections of the existing railway line infrastructure to support long-standing ambitions to export coal by bypassing South Africa.

This is in spite of a working railway line that connects Lephalale with the Port of Richards Bay, offering a much shorter pit-to-port leg from Botswana’s coal fields alongside the country’s Limpopo River border with South Africa.

The decision was reportedly made at a ministerial meeting last week in Harare, where cooperation between the three countries’ railway companies (CFM, NZR and Botswana Railways) was reaffirmed.

The upgrades will, for the most part, involve upgrading the line from Chicualacuala on Mozambique’s border with Zimbabwe, going north-west from there to the Dabuka Marshalling Yard south of Gweru, and on to Bulawayo in the south east.

The rehabilitation work involves a distance of 614 kilometres of railway line.

Mozambique indicated that the replacement of railway sleepers of a section of the line between Chokwe and Mabalane to the south of Chicualacuala would be completed within the next three months.

The rehabilitation of sections of an existing line connecting hinterland areas with the Port of Maputo is linked to the proposed development of a new deepwater port south of Maputo at Techobanine, which has been in the pipeline for more than a decade.