What East Africa's new railways will cost

[John Ashworth]

WHAT EAST AFRICA’S NEW RAILWAYS WILL COST

Posted on 01 November 2009 by Railways Africa Editor

According to figures published recently in the East African press, the proposed 928km standard gauge Mombasa-Kisumu line is projected to cost about $US4 billion. Passengers are being promised speeds of 120km/h in double-deck trains.

Meanwhile “the overall cost of the 2050 [Nairobi] master plan is $3 billion for an electric urban train.”

The much publicised Dar-es-Salaam-Rwanda-Burundi line (also to be standard gauge) will absorb $3.5 billion in terms of the latest estimates. This comprises around 1,000km to Isaka and at least 400km of entirely new construction beyond.

It isn’t at all clear why the much greater distance should be expected to cost less, and nobody has yet clarified whether the price of new standard gauge rolling stock and locomotives has been taken into account.

Restoring Uganda’s long-derelict Kasese line running westwards from Kampala (333km) is budgeted at $40 million. As one journalist puts it, that isn’t much more than the $35 million spent on Entebbe airport in 2007, ahead of Queen Elizabeth’s visit. “It is not that the money [for the various rail schemes] was not there before,” he writes, “just a shift in spending priorities.”

In the next 20 year, the current 15 million tonnes of goods conveyed along the “northern corridor” (from Mombasa to Kisumu, Kampala and beyond) – 90% by road – is expected to double.

Uganda’s clearing and forwarding agents say it costs $5,000 to transport goods on a 17-tonne lorry from Mombasa to Kampala, roughly $294.1 per tonne. This is more than three times the cost of transporting the same goods by rail– at about $92 per tonne. Ugandan transporters pay around $4,800 to transport a container by road,
Kenyans about $780. This is still around three times the cost in European Union countries.