Kenya to spend over half a billion on land for new railway

Kenya plans to spend the equivalent of about R557 million for the land on which a Chinese contractor is building a standard wide-gauge railway.

The R171 billion rail project was started last December, and will eventually link Kenya’s Indian Ocean port of Mombasa to the capital Nairobi, then on to Kampala, Uganda.

It will replace the existing narrow gauge Rift Valley Railway built by the British in 1896, and running 560 miles from Mombasa, through Nairobi, and up the Rift Valley to Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria.

Its other leg traversed the Great Rift Valley across Kenya to eventually reach Kampala.

But, according to press reports, years of mismanagement in Kenya and Uganda led to a lack of maintenance of the locos, rolling stock and the track, and freight transport in the region saw a switch to road.

That, in turn, led to serious road damage, and the two governments hope that the new line – able to carry heavier containers faster - will relieve this pressure on the region’s roads.