New train with 120 wagons connects Brazil’s main agro-industrial corridor to Port of Santos

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Rumo, a Brazilian rail logistics company controlled by Cosan Logística, completed in March the first year of the project that connects the municipality of Rondonópolis (MT) with the port of Santos, operating trains with 120 wagons.

The goal is to increase capacity and efficiency in Brazil’s main agro-industrial corridor.

According to Portos e Navios, the model represents a capacity increase of about 50% compared to the trains that ran with 80 wagons.

At 11,500 tons per train, the operation recorded a monthly volume of more than 5.5 billion tons per kilometer (TKU) in northern operations in March, equivalent to 3.9 million tons.

In addition to the promising start to 2022, the company had already recorded the highest volume in its history in 2021 with 64 billion TKU.

The result was driven by flows from Mato Grosso, where Rumo grew by 3.7 percentage points and carried 20 million tons, representing a market share of 43 % of the volume of grain exported.

Last year, the company counted 1,585 trips with the 120-car model, which would correspond proportionally to 2,377 trips of trains with 80 cars.

In other words, there was a reduction of 792 trips with the new operation, a measure that not only favors the flow of the productive sector, but also reduces the disruption of trains in the urban perimeters of the municipalities through which they pass.

Originally, the train was to be powered by five locomotives, but during 2021 studies and adjustments were made that allowed the use of only four locomotives in the composition.

This fact, together with the support of semi-autonomous driving technologies on board, allowed a more efficient cycle to serve the main production regions of the country.

This new model used by Rumo is based on the full soybean harvest, whose estimate by the Institute of Agronomy of Mato Grosso (Imea) indicates a harvest of 39.48 million tons in Mato Grosso in the 21/22 crop, the largest amount in the historical series, 9.5% higher than the harvest of the last crop (36.05 million tons).

Currently, Rumo carries an average of 6.5 trains per day to the port of Santos, five of which depart from the main grain terminal in Latin America in Rondonópolis.