Friends of the Rail Forum

East Africa readies for new rail line, a century after the first one

By NATION Reporter
Posted Friday, July 10 2009 at 22:30

The government has set in motion plans for the construction of the second railway line in Kenya in more than a century.

Kenya Railways Corporation managing director Nduva Muli said on Friday the parastatal would soon start inviting consultants for the design of the new track.

This follows the allocation of Sh3 billion in the budget for the construction of a new standard-gauge railway line linking the port at Mombasa to Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, through Uganda.

According to Mr Muli, the construction of the railway requires $8.5 billion (Sh680 billion) with the cost expected to be shared by the three countries.

“The allocation might look small but it is actually a good beginning,” said Mr Muli.

The construction is expected to start next year and it would take a minimum of three years to complete the job, he added.

It will be the first time new railway tracks will be laid in Kenya more than a century after the current one was completed by the British using Indian coolies.

The advantage of the standard gauge railway lies in its ability to handle more weight and speed than the current one.

The internationally recommended track width is 1.4 metres and the region’s rail system at a metre wide is seen as obsolete and unproductive.

Mr Muli added that plans to revamp commuter rail transport in Nairobi were progressing smoothly with studies on the number of people it would serve and the volume of traffic having been completed.

He said talks on cancelling the concession agreement between the government and Rift Valley Railways are still going on but declined to disclose further details.

Mr Muli was speaking at the launch of a new curriculum for the Railways Training Institute held at Panari Hotel. He said KR had proposed that RTI be converted into a State corporation to develop into a reputable technical training centre for the region.

Currently, RTI is a department of KR and is managed by a board that reports to the Kenya Railways’ board of directors.

RTI’s principal Milly Kiziili-Otieno said the institute needed an independent budget and to enable it make decisions faster.

A line linking it to the main Mombasa-Nairobi section of the railway has also been encroached upon, making it hard for the students to do their practical work.

She said the idea behind RTI’s independence was to enable it grow into a university.

RTI was, however, warned against being too ambitious and diverting from its core business.

Prof Seth Owido, the academic registrar at Egerton University, cautioned against the trend where technical institutes are being upgraded to university status, sometimes without facilities.

The advantage of the standard gauge railway lies in its ability to handle more weight and speed than the current one.
The internationally recommended track width is 1.4 metres and the region’s rail system at a metre wide is seen as obsolete and unproductive.

This kind of misinformation (not so much from the railways MD, but probably initially fed from the railway promoters and suppliers) always gets to me. I have nothing against standard gauge, but is it really so much better in this environment? This kind of investment deal (like the Gautrain) always strikes me as being promoted by overseas vested interests who have more interest in creating white-elephant projects to off-load excess standard gauge materiel and production capacity than in the reality of African economics. Unfortunately, too many African parastatal organisations fall for it.
Would the freight carried really know or notice the supposed difference in speed. How much time would standard gauge really cut off the end-to-end delivery (from ship docking to delivery at the consignee)? I suspect the comparison is made between the current run-down, ex-colonial, railway speeds and those of the dedicated high-speed alignments of Europe. In reality, it would be way too expensive to build such high-speed alignments in most of Africa. For Africa, one would more likely end up with a standard gauge railway alignment built down to a cost and therefore running not much faster than the existing metre gauge lines could, if they were properly upgraded and re-aligned. Several of the 1065 mm lines in South Africa prove that. Freight trains running at speeds of up to 90 km/h (and maybe more on occasion) and 20,000 tonne, 200 wagon trains are quite normal.
Methinks that the real issue with East African railway efficiency is not the 1000 mm gauge but the under-investment and apparently run-down state of the infrastructure. Would it not be possible to re-align, rehabilitate and upgrade the existing trackage and repair/replace rolling stock to achieve the same or similar benefits for considerably less money?

Aha, we've had this discussion before! Obviously a lot of the points you make about the capacity of Cape Gauge and Metre Gauge vis a vis Standard (Stephenson) Gauge are true, as has been demonstrated in South Africa (and probably Australia too).

But the basic question, "Would it be cheaper to upgrade the existing Mombasa-Kampala line to handle the required capacity or to build a new one?" is not merely a question of whether Standard Gauge can intrinsically carry greater capacity than Metre Gauge. The existing line has sharp curves and steep gradients, and in one location (Mazeras) has a spiral. I don't know what the weight and speed limits are on bridges, embankments, etc, nor what are the loading gauge clearances. Neither do I know the actual condition of the infrastructure. I don't even know whether the route chosen over 100 years ago based on the available technology is the optimum route given the availability of new technology.

So it might well be that building a completely new line is the best and cheapest solution, regardless of what gauge one chooses. If that is the case, why not build it to Standard Gauge?