During this time, the State-owned utility’s scope of maintenance work will include replacing 30 623 sleepers, three turnouts, 5 km of catenary wire, 1.2 km of contact wire and 870 insulators, as well as doing ballast screening, tamping and regulation on many kilometres of track.

Part of this year’s maintenance will include the installation of a permanent bridge to replace a temporary emergency bridge that was installed at Vredendal.

The emergency bridge was installed after an incident occurred in November last year, whereby an abnormal low-bed vehicle loaded with an excavator collided with and damaged the bridge deck.

TFR conducts annual scheduled maintenance on the corridor, which stretches 861 km from Sishen, in the Northern Cape, to Saldanha, in the Western Cape.