03/12/2012
When 19th century British engineers hacked through the savannah to build Kenya’s first railway, man-eating lions, malarial swamps and spiralling costs prompted derision from home, with the venture dubbed “the lunatic line”.
Although more than 1,700 miles of tracks were eventually laid by the British, decades of post-independence mismanagement has now left the country with less than 700 miles of operational railway.
But on Tuesday Kenya opened its first new train station in 80 years, an event seen as the rebirth of rail and a symbol of the growth of East Africa’s largest economy.
The new station, 10 miles east of Nairobi, will send five trains a day from new suburban housing estates straight into the city centre in 25 minutes, a third of the time it currently takes on clogged roads.
For much of that journey, today’s commuters will ride on rails laid down by the British.
The Uganda Railway, as it was officially known, was envisaged as a link from Kenya’s Indian Ocean ports to the British Empire’s most politically and economically strategic colony, Uganda.
Work started in 1896, and almost instantly hit disaster as 30 indentured Indian and African labourers were killed by two lions known as the Man-Eaters of Tsavo.
Hundreds more died, many of malaria, until opposition MPs who nicknamed the project “the lunatic line” scrapped construction before the tracks had even reached Uganda, its intended destination.
Winston Churchill, who shot zebras next to the train’s engines, later called the endeavour “one of the finest expositions [of] the British art of 'muddling through’”.
“Through everything — through the forests, through the ravines, through troops of marauding lions, through famine, through war, through five years of excoriating Parliamentary debate, muddled and marched the railway,” he said.
Following independence in 1963, Kenya’s railways became a cash cow however, especially by Daniel arap Moi, the former president, and much of the network today lies in ruins.
The main link from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean, via Nairobi to Malaba on Kenya’s border with Uganda, remains the busiest stretch and still uses the route and most of the rails laid by the British between 1896 and 1901.
But an international consortium of investors, Rift Valley Railways, is now beginning a modernisation programme to bring Kenya’s railways into the modern age.
It intends to spend more than £180 million in the next five years on an expansion of both freight and passenger services, including the opening of Syokimau station and its new services.
The new station takes its name from an 18th-century prophetess of the Kamba tribe who, legend claims, was the first to predict the arrival of the British.
Syokimau is said to have described pale-skinned people would bring an “iron snake” that she said would move “with the legs of a millipede” and “breathe smoke”.
“The biggest challenge that the city has been facing is a lack of good infrastructure and transport to meet the needs of a growing metropolis,” said Brown Ondego, RVR’s executive chairman.
“Over the next five to seven years, the commuter railway network will be developed to about 70 miles, and we expect 50,000 to 70,000 people to be taking the train on a daily basis by then.”
Currently, an estimated 30,000 people a day use Nairobi’s 18 existing commuter services.
As Kenya’s economy expands at five per cent a year, so its middle class has also grown. Many are now buying up newbuild houses in modern estates to Nairobi’s east, but are using their cars to drive to work in the city, causing terrible congestion.
But each of the new nine-coach trains will carry up to 1,600 passengers, equal to 115 of the overcrowded and polluting minibus taxis that many blame for today’s clogged roads.
