Uganda Railway

The Uganda Railway was a metre-gauge railway system and former British state-owned railway company. The line linked the interiors of Uganda and Kenya with the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa in Kenya. After a series of mergers and splits, the line is now in the hands of the Kenya Railways Corporation and the Uganda Railways Corporation.

Construction

thumb|right|400 px|Near Mombasa, about 1899

Background

Before the railway's construction, the Imperial British East Africa Company had begun the Mackinnon-Sclater road, a ox-cart track from Mombasa to Busia in Kenya, in 1890.

In July 1890, Britain was party to a series of anti-slavery measures agreed at the Brussels Conference Act of 1890. In December 1890, a letter from the Foreign Office to the treasury proposed constructing a railway from Mombasa to Uganda to disrupt the traffic of slaves from its source in the interior to the coast.

With steam-powered access to Uganda, the British could transport people and soldiers to ensure dominance of the African Great Lakes region.

In December 1891 Captain James Macdonald began an extensive survey which lasted until November 1892. At the time there was only one caravan route across the length of the country, forcing Macdonald and his party to march across unknown routes with limited supplies of water or food. The survey led to the first general map of the region.

The Uganda Railway was named after its ultimate destination, for its entire original length actually lay in what would become Kenya. Construction began at the port city of Mombasa in British East Africa in 1896 and finished at the line's terminus, Kisumu, on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria, in 1901.

Engineering

thumb|Uganda Railway. Mombasa to Port Florence

The railway is gauge and virtually all single-track with passing loops at stations. 200,000 individual rail-lengths and 1.2 million sleepers, 200,000 fish-plates, 400,000 fish-bolts and 4.8 million steel keys plus steel girders for viaducts and causeways had to be imported from India, necessitating the creation of a modern port at Kilindini Harbour in Mombasa. The railway was a huge logistical achievement and became strategically and economically vital for both Uganda and Kenya. It helped to suppress slavery, by removing the need for humans in the transport of goods.

Management

In August 1895, a bill was introduced at Westminster, becoming the (59 & 60 Vict. c. 38), which authorised the construction of a railway from Mombasa to the shores of Lake Victoria. The man tasked with building the railway was George Whitehouse, an experienced civil engineer who had worked across the British Empire. Whitehouse acted as the Chief Engineer between 1895 and 1903, also serving as the railway's manager from its opening in 1901. The consulting engineers were Sir Alexander Rendel of Sir A. Rendel & Son and Frederick Ewart Robertson.

Workers

The construction of the Uganda Railway between Mombasa and Lake Victoria relied heavily on imported labour from British India. Recruitment was overseen from Karachi, with Lahore serving as the main centre for sourcing workers from Punjabi villages. More than 30,000 labourers were contracted, the majority from Punjab and Gujarat, particularly Sikhs and Gujaratis. Officials turned to Indian labour because African recruitment was limited by resistance to colonial mobilisation and by the perception that Indians possessed more experience in railway construction.

Contracts nominally promised wages of twelve rupees per month, rations, medical care, and return passage. Long hours, inadequate rations, overcrowded housing, and exposure to diseases such as malaria and dysentery led to widespread illness and mortality. Accidents such as landslides, explosions, and falls added to the toll, as did attacks from wildlife, most famously the Tsavo lions. The force was composed of Indians and two officers were lent by the Indian government to drill and superintend the force. A maximum of 400 constables were recruited, and the force was handed over to the Protectorate government on completion of the railway.

Tsavo man-eating lions

The incidents for which the building of the railway may be most noted are the killings of a number of construction workers in 1898, during the building of a bridge across the Tsavo River. Hunting mainly at night, a pair of maneless male lions stalked and killed at least 28 Indian and African workers – although some accounts put the number of victims as high as 135.

Lunatic Express

The Uganda Railway faced a great deal of criticism in Parliament, with many parliamentarians decrying it as exorbitantly expensive. Whilst the concept of cost-benefit analysis did not exist in public spending in the Victorian Era, the huge capital sums of the project nevertheless made many sceptical of the value of the investment. This, coupled with the fatalities and wastage of the personnel constructing it through disease, tribal activity, and hostile wildlife led the Uganda Railway to be dubbed a Lunatic Line:

Political resistance to this "gigantic folly", as Henry Labouchère called it, surfaced immediately. Such arguments along with the claim that it would be a waste of taxpayers' money were easily dismissed by the Conservatives. Years before, Joseph Chamberlain had proclaimed that, if Britain were to step away from its "manifest destiny", it would by default leave it to other nations to take up the work that it would have been seen as "too weak, too poor, and too cowardly" to have done itself. Its cost has been estimated by one source at £3 million in 1894 money, which is more than £170 million in 2005 money, and £5.5 million or £650 million in 2016 money by another source. and extended to it to Arua near the border with Zaïre in 1964.

Inland shipping

Lake Victoria

Almost from its inception the Uganda Railway developed shipping services on Lake Victoria. In 1898 it launched the 110 ton at Kisumu, having assembled the vessel from a "knock down" kit supplied by Bow, McLachlan and Company of Paisley in Scotland. A succession of further Bow, McLachlan & Co. "knock down" kits followed. The 662 ton sister ships and (1902 and 1903), the 1,134 ton (1907) and the 1,300 ton sister ships and (1914 and 1915) were combined passenger and cargo ferries. The 812 ton SS Nyanza (launched after Clement Hill) was purely a cargo ship. The 228 ton launched in 1913 was a tugboat. Two more tugboats from Bow, McLachlan were added in 1925: and .

Lake Kyoga, Lake Albert and the Nile

The company extended its steamer service with a route across Lake Kyoga and down the Victoria Nile to Pakwach at the head of the Albert Nile. Its Lake Victoria ships were unsuitable for river work so it introduced the stern wheel paddle steamers (1910) and

Passengers were invited to ride a platform on the front of the locomotive from which they might see the passing game herds more closely. During Roosevelt's journey, he claimed that "on this, except at mealtime, I spent most of the hours of daylight."

Current status

thumb|left|Former train still in use (2017)

thumb|Several parts of the old metre gauge line have been neglected and overgrown with bushes.|alt=Picture showing the old metre gauge railway line neglected and overgrown with bushes.

After independence, the railways in Kenya and Uganda fell into disrepair. In summer 2016, a reporter for The Economist magazine took the Lunatic Express from Nairobi to Mombasa. He found the railway to be in poor condition, departing 7 hours late and taking 24 hours for the journey. The last metre-gauge train between Mombasa and Nairobi made its run on 28 April 2017. The line between Nairobi and Kisumu near the Kenya–Uganda border had been closed in 2012, but seasonal passenger services have resumed since late 2021.

From 2014 to 2016, the China Road and Bridge Corporation built the Mombasa–Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) parallel to the original Uganda Railway. Passenger service on the SGR was inaugurated on 31 May 2017.

Metre-gauge passenger services include commuter trains in the Nairobi area, one of which links the SGR Nairobi Terminus and the old Nairobi station. A similar link train between Mombasa Terminus and the old Mombasa station was established in September 2025.

As of 2025, the Nairobi-Nanyuki (weekly service) and the Nairobi-Kisumu (seasonal night service) Safari trains are the only long-distance passenger services on the metre-gauge network. Most of the Kenyan metre-gauge network is still operational for freight services, including sections running parallel to the SGR, and further reopenings are planned.

Research has shown that expectations and hopes for the transformations that the Uganda railway would bring about are similar to contemporary visions about the changes that would happen once East Africa became connected to high-speed fibre-optic broadband.

In popular culture

thumb|Jinja railway station with a Uganda Railways diesel locomotive.

A documentary on the construction of the line, The Permanent Way, was made in 1961. John Halkin's 1968 novel, Kenya, focuses on the construction of the railway and its defence during the First World War. The construction also serves as the backdrop to the novel Dance of the Jakaranda (Akashic Books, 2017) by Peter Kimani, and appears early in the novel A History of Burning by Janika Oza (2023).

The Tsavo man-eating lions at Tsavo feature in a factual account by Patterson's 1907 autobiographical book The Man-eaters of Tsavo. They are part of the plot of the 1956 film Beyond Mombasa, The Ghost and the Darkness in 1996, and Chander Pahar, a 2013 Bengali movie based on the 1937 novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay.

Several other films have featured the Uganda Railway, including Bwana Devil, made in 1952. In addition, the 1985 film Out of Africa utilizes its railway equipment in several scenes, albeit out of place.

References

Footnotes

Bibliography

External links

History of the Uganda Railway
scale replica of EAR 31 class steam locomotive "Uganda" at Stapleford Miniature railway in the UK
illustrated description of the Uganda railway