Uganda Railway

This article is about the British colonial undertaking of 1896–1929. For Uganda's state railway since 1977, see Uganda Railways Corporation.

Near Mombasa, about 1899

The Uganda Railway, colloquially known as the Lunatic Express or the Lunatic Line, is a railway system and former railway company dating to the colonial period. The line links the interiors of Uganda and Kenya with the Indian Ocean at Mombasa in Kenya.

Origins

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The official approach, British and local, to both slavery and free porter labour included a genuine belief that the man doing the work had real interests which deserved concern and protection. No such concern was evident among parliamentarians, missionaries or administrators for those at work on the construction of the Uganda Railway. It was decided to build the railway as quickly as possible; its construction was viewed almost as a military attack—casualties were inevitable and might be large if the objective were to be attained and momentum not lost.

—Anthony Clayton & Donald C. Savage

Built during the Scramble for Africa, the Uganda Railway was the one genuinely strategic railway to be constructed in tropical Africa at that time. 2,498 workers would die during its construction.

The Uganda Railway was named after its ultimate destination, for its entire original 660-mile 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. 200,000 individual 9-metre (30 ft) rail-lengths and 1.2 million sleepers, 200,000 fish-plates, 400,000 fish-bolts and 4.8 million steel keys including steel girders for viaducts and causeways had to be imported, necessitating the creation of a modern port at Kilindini in Mombasa. With their new steam-powered access to Uganda, the British could transport people and soldiers about to ensure their domination of the region.

Prior to the railway's construction, the British East Africa Company had begun the Mackinnon-Sclater road, a 600 miles (970 km) ox-cart track from Mombasa to Busia in Kenya, in 1890.

The railway is 1,000 mm (3 ft 3 ³⁄₈ in) gauge and virtually all single-track.

Construction was carried out principally by labourers from British India, 32,000 of whom were brought in because of a lack of indigenous labour. While most of the surviving Indians returned home, 6,724 decided to remain after the line's completion, creating a community of Indian East Africans.

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.

A railway siding connecting to the residence of the High Commissioner to Uganda was used by Governor Frederick John Jackson and his 1910 BSA railcar that was used for his hunting parties. The railcar was recently restored in South Africa. The Governor lent his railcar to President Theodore Roosevelt on his visit to Uganda during the Smithsonian–Roosevelt African Expedition; a trip along the railway is chronicled in Roosevelt's book African Game Trails.

Lunatic Express

The term Lunatic Express was coined by Charles Miller in his 1971 The Lunatic Express: An Entertainment in Imperialism. Africans called it the "Iron Snake".

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. Estimated at £3 million in 1894, over £170m in 2005 money.

Due to the shaky-looking wooden trestle bridges, enormous chasms, prohibitive cost, hostile tribes, men infected by the hundreds by diseases, and man-eating lions pulling railway workers out of carriages at night, the name "Lunatic Line" certainly seemed to fit. Winston Churchill, who regarded it "a brilliant conception", said of the project: "The British art of 'muddling through' is here seen in one of its finest expositions. 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."

Kedong Massacre

Building the railway met local resistance on various occasions. A major incident was the Kedong Massacre, when the Maasai attacked a railway worker's caravan killing around 500 people because two Maasai girls had been raped. Englishman Andrew Dick led a counter-attack against them, but ran out of ammunition and was speared to death by the Maasai.

At the turn of the 20th century, the railway construction was disturbed by the resistance by Nandi people led by Koitalel Arap Samoei. He was killed in 1905 by Richard Meinertzhagen, finally ending the Nandi resistance.

The Tsavo Incident

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.

Extensions and branches

Uganda Railway is 1,000 mm (3 ft 3 ³⁄₈ in) metre gauge.

Disassembled ferries were shipped from Scotland by sea to Mombasa and then by rail to Kisumu where they were reassembled and provided a service to Port Bell and, later, other ports on Lake Victoria (see section below). An 11-kilometre (7 mi) rail line between Port Bell and Kampala was the final link in the chain providing efficient transport between the Ugandan capital and the open sea at Mombasa, more than 1,400 km (900 mi) away.

Branch lines were built to Thika in 1913, Lake Magadi in 1915, Kitale in 1926, Naro Moro in 1927 and from Tororo to Soroti in 1929. In 1929 the Uganda Railway became Kenya and Uganda Railways and Harbours (KURH), which in 1931 completed a branch line to Mount Kenya and extended the main line from Nakuru to Kampala in Uganda. In 1948 KURH became part of the East African Railways Corporation, which added the line from Kampala to Kasese in western Uganda in 1956. and extended to it to Arua near the border with Zaire in 1964.

Inland shipping

Lake Victoria

Main article: Lake Victoria ferries § Steamers

Almost from its inception the Uganda Railway developed shipping services on Lake Victoria. In 1898 it launched the 110 ton SS William Mackinnon 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 SS Winifred and SS Sybil (1902 and 1903), the 1,134 ton SS Clement Hill (1907) and the 1,300 ton sister ships SS Rusinga and SS Usoga (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 SS Kavirondo launched in 1913 was a tugboat. Two more tugboats from Bow, McLachlan were added in 1925: SS Buganda and SS Buvuma.

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 PS Speke (1910) and PS Stanley (1913) for the new service. In the 1920s the company added PS Grant (1925) and the side wheel paddle steamer PS Lugard (1927).

The Railway and tourism

Former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (seated, at left) and friends mount the observation platform of the Uganda Railway

Reproduction poster of an advertisement for the railway. Note chopper coupling.

As the only modern means of transport from the East African coast to the higher plateaus of the interior, a ride on the Uganda Railway became an essential overture to the safari adventures which grew in popularity in the first two decades of the 20th century. As a result it usually featured prominently in the accounts written by travelers in British East Africa. The rail journey stirred many a romantic passage, like this one from former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, who rode the line to start his world-famous safari in 1909:

The railroad, the embodiment of the eager, masterful, materialistic civilization of today, was pushed through a region in which nature, both as regards wild man and wild beast, does not differ materially from what it was in Europe in the late Pleistocene.

Passengers were invited to ride a platform on the front of the locomotive (pictured at right) 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 usage

Parts of the railway remain in use today.

Kenya

The Kenya Railways Corporation runs passenger trains between Mombasa and Nairobi. The line between Nairobi and Kisumu near the Kenya-Uganda border has been closed since 2012.

Uganda

The URC was the joint recipient of the 2001 Worldaware Business Award for "assisting economic and social development through the provision of appropriate, sustainable and environmentally complementary transport infrastructure". The Uganda Railways Update Report gives details of management improvement.

Books and movies

Jinja railway station with a Uganda Railways diesel locomotive.

• Halkin, John, 1986, Kenya, New York, Beaufort Books: A novel focusing on the construction of the railroad and its defence during the First World War

Man-eating lions at Tsavo during the construction of the Uganda Railway feature in books:

• Coates, Frank, 2005, Beyond Mombasa
• Patterson, J.H., 1907, The Man-eaters of Tsavo

Movies:

• Bwana Devil, (1952)
• The Ghost and the Darkness, (1996)
• Chander Pahar, a 2013 Bengali movie based on the book by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay
• The Permanent Way (1961)is based on the building of the railway from Mombasa, through Kenya, to Uganda.
• Out of Africa (1985) shows the railway in many of its scenes

Books:

• Amin, Mohamed, Railway Across Equator
• Chander Pahar, a 1937 Bengali novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay
• Hill, M.F., Permanent Way Vol 1: official history

See also

• Kenya Railways Corporation
• MacKinnon-Sclater road
• Rail transport in Kenya
• Transport in Uganda
• Uganda Railways Corporation

External links

• History of the Uganda Railway
• 1/4 scale replica of EAR 31 class steam locomotive "Uganda" at Stapleford Miniature railway in the UK
• illustrated description of the Uganda railway