PN have made a mess of rail freight. ..... They have only kept customers directly connected with their main forwarder TOLL. ..... Coal is down. It is not looking pretty. They also lost Petroleum in NSW and VIC. Quite a mess.
PN didn't 'lose' fuel distribution - the oil companies because they were closing down their refineries decided that rail distribution was too expensive with all fuel being imported pre-refined out of Singapore and elsewhere. If rail was able to make a solid business case that's cheaper than road freight distribution it would come back to rail, but road freight is under-pinned by favourable legistative frameworks at state and federal level that grossly disadvantage rail.
To get fuel back to rail would also require destroying the retailing monopoly on fuel created by Colesworth Inc (ie. Coles and Woolies via their Caltex and Shell alliances respectively). The Colesworth monopoly effectively ring fences the road transport distribution of fuel from any competition.
The same things apply to mail/parcels. Before there was ever such as thing as Star Track Express (which AusPost took over), bulk mail and parcels distribution was done mostly by rail, and places like Sydney used to actual do parcel and freight delivery internally as part o it's overall model (parcel vans, Trackfast, etc.). Now AusPost is basically just a glorified road transport company that just happens to have mail and parcels as it's 'core commodity'.
Saying PN's only kept customers connected to TOLL is only true of intermodal. Toll has nothing to do with Graincorp (grain) or any of the coal mining companies PN services. In fact there's a strong chance PN is going to take some coal work off Aurizon in the Hunter Valley soon.
All companies have the same problem - Aurizon in QLD have been getting their smeg kicked by PN (and by BMA). In NSW PN gets it's smeg kicked by Aurizon, Qube, SSR, GWA/Freightliner, etc. Same sandwich, just different fillings. In SA PN, GWA and SCT/SBR kick each other's asses regularly. Take away Freightlink out of GWA's business and they'd basically have very little since SCT took back crewing of it's own trains (and started up a partnership with Momentum to casualise it's train crewing workforce).
