| Cairo–Cape railway | |
| Type: | High-speed rail Heavy rail |
| Status: | Only a few stretches in operation 5625km (3,495miles) |
| Linelength Km: | 10489 |
| Start: | Cape Town, South Africa |
| End: | Port Said, Egypt |
| Electrification: | 25 kV 50/60 Hz AC |
The Cape to Cairo Railway was an unfinished project to create a railway line crossing from southern to northern Africa. It would have been the largest, and most important, railway of the continent. It was planned as a link between Cape Town in South Africa and Port Said in Egypt.[1] [2]
The project was never completed. Completed parts have been inoperative for many years, as a result of wars and lack of maintenance by the former colonies.
The plan was initiated at the end of the 19th century, during the time of Western European colonial rule. It was largely based on the vision of Cecil Rhodes, an attempt to connect African colonies of the British Empire through a continuous railway line from Cape Town, South Africa to Cairo, Egypt.[3]
The original proposal for a Cape Town to Cairo railway was made in 1874 by Edwin Arnold, then the editor of The Daily Telegraph, which was joint sponsor of the expedition by H.M. Stanley to Africa to discover the course of the Congo River.[4] The proposed route involved a mixture of railway and river transport between Elizabethville in the Belgian Congo (now Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Sennar in the Sudan rather than a completely rail one.[5]
Imperialist and entrepreneur Cecil Rhodes was instrumental in securing the southern states of the continent for the British Empire and envisioned a continuous "red line" of British dominions from north to south. A railway would be a critical element in this scheme to unify the possessions, facilitate governance, enable the military to move quickly to hot spots or conduct war, help settlement and enable an internal and external trade of continental goods. The construction of this project presented a major technological challenge.
France had a somewhat rival strategy in the late 1890s to link its western and eastern African colonies, namely Senegal to Djibouti. Southern Sudan and Ethiopia were in the way, but France sent expeditions in 1897 to establish a protectorate in southern Sudan and to find a route across Ethiopia. The scheme foundered when a British flotilla on the Nile River confronted the French expedition at the point of intersection between the French and British routes, leading to the Fashoda Incident and eventual French retreat.
The Portuguese considered an Angola to Mozambique railway to link west with east and produced the "Pink Map" representing their claims to sovereignty in Africa (to link Angola and Mozambique). These plans ended after the 1890 British Ultimatum.
Opposition to British rule in South Africa was settled after the First and Second Boer Wars (the wars ended in 1902, but the new Union of South Africa did not incorporate its two states until 1910).
Egypt has a rail system that, as early as 1854, connected Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo, and now currently goes as far south as Aswan. In Egypt the railway is . After a ferry link up on the Nile, the railway continues in Sudan from Wadi Halfa to Khartoum at the Cape gauge; see Northern Africa Railroad Development. This part of the system was started by Lord Kitchener in 1897 to provide supplies during his war against the Mahdist uprising. Further railway links go south, the most southern point being Wau.
South Sudan became independent in 2011. The border between Sudan and South Sudan is closed, and the railways in South Sudan are no longer operational.
Most of Sudan's railway network is in disrepair due to political turmoil and US sanctions. A Khartoum–Atbara railway service began running in 2014 after China provided equipment and supplies.[6] Other railway services have been put into place in Khartoum and surrounding areas.[7]
British interests had to overcome obstacles of geography and climate, and the competing imperial schemes of the French, Portuguese and Germans. In 1891, Germany secured the strategically critical territory of German East Africa, which, along with the mountainous rainforest of the Belgian Congo, precluded the building of a Cape to Cairo railway.
In 1916, during World War I, British, African, and Indian soldiers won the Tanganyika Territory (now modern-day Tanzania) from the German Empire. The British continued to rule the territory after the war, which was a League of Nations mandate from 1922. The continuous line of colonies necessary were gained.
The southern section was completed during British rule before the First World War and has an interconnecting system of national railways using the Cape gauge of . Construction started from Cape Town and went parallel to the Great North Road to Kimberley through a part of Botswana to Bulawayo. From this junction the link proceeded further north. The Victoria Falls Bridge was completed in 1905.
The British Empire possessed the political power to complete the Cape to Cairo Railway, but economics, including the Great Depression of the 1930s, prevented its completion before World War II.[8] After World War II, the Decolonization of Africa and the establishment of independent countries removed the colonial rationale for the project and increased the project's difficulty, effectively ending the project.
Currently operational length is 5625km (3,495miles) out of total 10489km (6,518miles). The operational status of sections of the railway is as follows:
See main article: Uganda Railway. East Africa has a network of narrow gauge railways that historically grew from ports on the Indian Ocean and went westward, built in parallel under British and German colonial rule. The furthest string north was the Uganda Railway. Eventually these networks were linked, so that today there is a continuous rail connection between Kampala, Uganda, on Lake Victoria to the coastal cities of Mombasa in Kenya and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. Up to the break-up of the East African Community in 1977, these companies operated as East African Railways, but operate today as different national companies.
See main article: TAZARA Railway. From Dar es Salaam, a 1,860 km rail link to Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia was built from 1970 to 1975 as a turnkey project financed and supported by China. This Tanzania-Zambia-Railway (TAZARA) was built to connect landlocked Zambia and its mineral wealth to a port on the Indian Ocean, independent from port connections in South Africa, a frequent rival economic competitor in the mining sectors or Mozambique, at that time Portuguese-controlled territory. Not intended in the grand picture of the Cape to Cairo Railway, the TAZARA fills a critical link. This connection uses the gauge of the southern part of Africa.
See main article: Benguela railway. In the city of Tenke, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, there is an interconnection of the Cape-Cairo Railway with the Katanga-Benguela railway linking it to the port of Lobito in Angola, on the Atlantic coast.[1] [2]
In 1998, a transshipment hub was built at Kidatu in southern Tanzania to connect the metre gauge Central Line (Tanzania) with the Cape gauge TAZARA line. This also shortened the distance.
See main article: Rail transport in Mozambique. The railway is connected to the Mozambican, Zimbabwean and South African systems through the Beira-Bulawayo railway, the Limpopo railway and the Pretoria-Maputo railway, reaching the ports of Maputo and Beira.
The Court Treatt expedition, an attempt to travel from Cape to Cairo by road, was made in 1924 using two cars.[9]
The Cape to Cairo Road was planned to roughly connect the same countries. That plan was updated with the Cairo–Cape Town Highway plan, large sections of which are paved and passable.
John Crowley's science fiction novella Great Work of Time features an alternative history in which the British Empire survived to the end of the 20th century and beyond, and the Cape to Cairo Railway was completed. In an early chapter the protagonist travels in comfort the whole route from South Africa to Egypt.