Cape Chamber welcomes CT company’s freight rail innovation milestone

As Treasury steps in on fuel, rail innovation offers potential long-term solution to high freight inflation

A Cape Town company has successfully trialed a home-grown rail-monitoring device developed in response to crippling theft and vandalism of South Africa's rail infrastructure.

TrackView™ was developed in Somerset West by HisWay Labs, a local engineering enterprise specialising in IoT security solutions. The device is a solar-powered rail sensor that uses the railway track itself to continuously monitor rail integrity—detecting breaks and track damage—while accurately tracking train positions and speeds in real time. It is billed as ‘theft-resistant’ because, unlike expensive railway signalling equipment, it has neither copper nor batteries, and therefore little if any second-hand value.

Significantly, it has now been successfully trialed on a 10km section of track in the Northern Cape. The full detail of the trial is not yet public knowledge.

Welcoming news of the pilot, Megan Gobey, Vice-Chairperson of the Cape Chamber's Transport and Related (Freight) Portfolio Committee, noted the significance of the national utility testing the locally developed innovation:  "If Transnet are looking at this system then that is a huge win, because they couldn't come up with a solution to solve the vandalism."

Restoring freight rail reliability has become a national economic priority. Over the past decade, severe infrastructure decay, cable theft, and widespread vandalism have forced millions of tonnes of bulk goods off the tracks and onto national roads.

This forced reliance on road haulage has severely inflated logistics overheads for South African businesses, driving up the cost of everyday consumer goods in an environment already strained by high fuel prices. Getting freight back on track through rapid, low-cost technologies is seen as one of the most direct levers to lower land transport costs, reduce diesel inflation pressures, and restore economic competitiveness.

The Cape Chamber has drawn attention to the impact of record fuel prices on the business environment. 
Speaking to Cape Chamber about the origins of the device, Kent Gibbon, Chief Commercial Officer of HisWay Labs, explained that South Africa's systemic infrastructure losses forced a complete redesign of conventional rail-monitoring hardware.

"Theft and vandalism have stripped our rail network of any equipment of value put on the side of the track," said Gibbon, pointing to multi-billion-rand signalling investments across Gauteng and other provinces that were rapidly gutted for copper, batteries, and large solar panels.

"South Africans have a unique problem to solve, with necessity being the mother of invention. To make something theft- and vandalism-resistant, we had to strip value out of the hardware so that what exists is of no value to second-hand syndicates, while ensuring it remains quick to replace and easy to maintain," Gibbon added. "We took the battery and copper out of the equipment and developed a novel technology that allowed us to patent it globally. By doing this, we’ve created a light-touch device that installs in less than an hour and can be replaced in under 10 minutes."

Transnet's key heavy-haul corridors have been severely compromised by recurring rail breaks—the Sishen-Saldanha iron ore line alone recorded 187 rail breaks in a single financial year, averaging one break every two days and causing costly operational shutdowns.

By offering continuous rail-break detection and condition monitoring without the vulnerability of traditional copper-heavy signalling systems, locally developed solutions provide a viable pathway to restoring freight volumes, protecting vital export corridors, and safeguarding national economic resilience.

The innovation has already secured seed development funding and backing from the Department of Science and Innovation via its Technology Innovation Agency (TIA). Furthermore, state passenger rail operator PRASA has issued TrackView™ formal certification and product type approval following prior network testing. 
Gibbon noted that the homegrown innovation holds significant export potential, with trials already completed in the United States and strong international market interest—including from India, which represents a key growth target. 

Nils Flaatten, strategic affairs and governance adviser at Blue Viking, said South Africa’s difficult operating environment had become ‘an unlikely incubator or innovation’.  “When infrastructure is unreliable, equipment is stolen and conventional solutions fail, South African engineers are forced to think differently. TrackView is a particularly good example of adversity producing technology with applications well beyond our borders.”

“But I would distinguish between our ability to innovate and our ability to implement at scale. TrackView demonstrates that we have the technical capability. The harder question is whether our institutions can adopt, procure and deploy these solutions quickly enough to make a meaningful difference. I am cautiously optimistic about rail. The growing involvement of private capital, technology providers and industry suggests a recognition that government cannot restore the network alone. But collaboration must move beyond agreements and announcements to measurable improvements in reliability, capacity and freight volumes.”

 “TrackView won’t fix Transnet or PRASA. What it can do is help restore an essential element of railway safety and operational visibility. That matters enormously. Perhaps the real story is that South Africa’s greatest export opportunity may lie in the solutions we have been forced to invent to overcome our own institutional failures.”