MRS intends to triple its capacity up to Santos
Valor Econômico
MRS Logística has officially announced its plans to increase the capacity of its line of access up to the Port of Santos - the so-called cremalheira (the rack) - in the segment of the ridge between São Paulo and the coast. The system, only one in the world used for cargo, is formed by a gear wheel that moves over a special rail, which allows the train to go up the 800 meters of the Serra do Mar in less than 10 minutes. Initially, R$ 130 million (US$ 70.3 million) will be invested to change the locomotives used today, 12 1976 Hitachi models by seven Swiss Stadler machines - currently the only vendor of that type of equipment. With the change, scheduled for 2012, the gain in capacity will be 50%, getting to 12 million tons a year.
A second more ambitious phase of the project was also put on the table by MRS. Once the rail traffic knot of the capital of São Paulo is undone with the project of the rail beltway, the operator will take off the drawer a R$ 260 million (US$ 140.5 million) project that would triple the current capacity of the rack. That would allow diversifying the load to attract mainly containers - currently, the cargo carried by MRS to Santos is virtually only iron ore.
According to the Planning and Finance Officer of MRS, Henrique Aché Pillar, the goal of the investment in this first phase is only to increase the current descent capacity of the rack, which is already saturated. The current 8 million tons a year are practically all made up of the iron ore transported from Minas Gerais to Cubatão, to cater to Cosipa - Steel Plant of Usiminas, one of the shareholders of MRS. According to Henrique Pillar, today, 1 million tons of ore need to go down the Serra do Mar on trucks. With the capacity increased by 50%, says the officer, there should be a surplus in the capacity, which may be used to take agricultural bulk commodities like soybean and sugar down to Santos. The ascent can be used by cargo like fertilizers, salt, wheat and containers.
The second stage of the reform of the rack, says the Officer, will involve, besides new locomotives, the reform in line and in the infrastructure of the system, and that should cost twice as much as the invested in the first phase. But the total cargo capacity, the descent and ascent of Serra do Mar together, would get to 56 million tons - 3.5 times the current. This phase, says the officer, would only be put into practice if the "knot" in the railroad traffic inside the capital of São Paulo were resolved. MRS has a railroad grid that crosses the center of the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo and it is seen as ideal for the creation of a distribution network inside the capital - in particular, taking containers from Santos to inside the city of São Paulo. But the grid is saturated since it is shared by MRS and CPTM (São Paulo Metropolitan Train Company). Should the problem be solved, MRS intends to use the excess capacity and create a large distribution center inside the city - the land, in Moóca, is already defined.
The problem is that the road beltway project is currently stopped. It is one of the projects of the PAC (Growth Acceleration Program) with the greatest delays, and it should not move forward until June this year, when a study of World Bank order by the Government to clarify the issue will be ready. There are three different projects outlined to divert the traffic that passes through the capital, but only one of them solves the problem of MRS - the idea of segregation, which creates a line parallel to the rails of the CPTM in order to accommodate cargo trains. With the segregation the capacity of MRS would go from the current 15 million tons to nearly 45 million.