Uganda Standard Gauge Railway Project Initiated

Nov. 24—Construction of Uganda’s standard gauge railway (SGR) was initiated this month and will be completed in 4 years.

“This upcoming SGR project is a crucial part of a long-term plan. The plan is foreseen to address the congestion that is usually experienced in Ugandan roads,” Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, said during ceremony earlier this month that began the project.

The 272 km railway will connect the country’s capital, Kampala with Tororo on the border with Kenya, where it will connect with Kenya’s SGR network at Malaba on the Uganda-Kenya border and on to the port of Mombasa. The Turkish Yapi Merkezi engineering and construction company has been contracted to build the project at the cost of $3 billion. Yapi Merkezi has built railways throughout Türkiye, Tanzania, Ethiopia and other countries. According to Construction Review, the railway will have an annual cargo capacity of 25 million tons with speeds of 100km/h for cargo trains and 120km/h for passengers.

The railway will give landlocked Uganda direct railway access to the port of Mombasa, in Kenya, considerably reducing transportation costs. It is proposed that at Kampala two additional railways will be built. One running north into landlocked South Sudan and one running east into the Democratic Republic of Congo. The first phase of Tanzania’s SGR began operations from the port of Dar Es Salaam to the capital Dodoma earlier this month. When completed it will reach the border of landlocked Burundi, on to Rwanda, and eventually to Uganda and the D.R. Congo. The railways will be a major boost to the economies of landlocked central Africa.

One of obstacles to the integration of the African economies is that under colonial rule, any rail lines were built in multiple gauges so that they deliberately could not connect.