A freight train double-headed by two Class 87 diesel locomotives at the border station of Tororo, Uganda, 1971. (Source: Roger Farnworth – rogerfarnworth.com)
In 1894 Great Britain established a protectorate over the African kingdom of Buganda and its neighbors—the native states of Toro, Nkore, Busoga and Bunyoro. The new colony was named Uganda.
Even before these events the United Kingdom had signed up to the anti-slavery measures agreed at the Brussels Conference of 1890. In December of that year the Foreign Office proposed building a railway to Buganda from the port of Mombasa, then controlled by the Imperial British East Africa Company, in order to gain full control of the country’s territory under the pretext of fighting the slave trade.
In December 1891 Captain James Macdonald, an engineer and cartographer, began surveying the area of the planned line. Macdonald’s survey party performed a genuine feat, covering 6,890 km of unknown country in a year with limited supplies of water and food. The result was the first map of the region and a defined alignment for the railway.
James Ronald Leslie Macdonald (1862–1927), British military engineer, surveyor, cartographer and explorer of Africa and Tibet, 1898.
(Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Construction of the 1,060 km, 1,000 mm gauge line began at Mombasa in British East Africa in 1896 and finished in 1901 at Port Florence station (today Kisumu) on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria. It is worth noting that although the new line was named the Uganda Railway, the overwhelming part of it ran through territory that later became Kenya; only the stretch adjoining Lake Victoria originally belonged to Uganda, and after the border between the two protectorates was redrawn in April 1902 that stretch too passed to British East Africa.
A publicity poster for the Uganda Railway issued by its public relations service. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The construction was headed by the engineer Ronald Preston (the line’s terminus was named after his wife, Florence). The project’s chief engineer was George Whitehouse (1857–1938), an experienced builder who had worked across the British Empire; he also became the railway’s first general manager in 1901–1903. The Uganda Railway, in the building of which some 2,500 Indian workers died, was a typically imperial project in which strategic considerations plainly outweighed economic ones. The celebrated politician Winston Churchill, who called it a brilliant conception, wrote of the project in 1909: “The British art of muddling through is displayed here at its very best. In spite of everything—through forests, through ravines, through hordes of man-eating lions, through famine, through war, through five years of bitter parliamentary debate, the railway kept going, overcoming difficulties and pressing forward.”
Three ferries built by Bow, McLachlan and Company in the Scottish town of Paisley were shipped in knocked-down form to Lake Victoria over the newly built railway. They were reassembled at Port Florence and began sailing the lake. The main shipping route became Port Florence–Port Bell, some 300 km long. From Port Bell, in turn, an 11 km rail line was laid to Fort Lugard, the residence of the royal commissioner in Uganda, around which the city of Kampala—the country’s future capital—subsequently grew up.
A view of Port Bell and the rail branch from the deck of the laid-up ferry Pamba, built in 1985 by N.V. Shipbuilders, 12 April 2018. (Source: Wikimedia Commons. Photo: Jim Joel)
This short but strategically important branch did not remain Uganda’s only railway for long. In 1910–1912 another line was built, 95 km long, from the town of Jinja to Namasagali, linking Lake Victoria with Lake Kyoga and making it possible to bypass the rapids on the upper Victoria Nile.
The experience of the First World War, when fighting spread to East Africa and some of the Lake Victoria ferries were converted into gunboats, showed how important it was to create a wholly overland rail route into Uganda. In 1928, therefore, the Mombasa–Kisumu and Jinja–Namasagali lines were joined by building the Nakuru–Malaba–the border between British Kenya and Uganda–Tororo–Mbulamuti section (514 km, of which 143 km lay in Uganda), and the following year the 161 km Tororo–Soroti branch entered service. In that same year, 1929, the Uganda Railway was renamed Kenya and Uganda Railways and Harbours (KURH), with its headquarters at Namasagali. The finishing touch was the commissioning in 1931 of the Jinja–Kampala section (91 km) with its bridge over the Victoria Nile, after which through trains began running between Mombasa and Kampala. Cotton and coffee became Uganda’s principal export cargoes.
A Beyer, Peacock & Co. locomotive with a passenger train at a passing loop, Kenya and Uganda Railways. (Source: Beyer-Garratt, the patented duplex locomotive for the railways of the USSR. – [Manchester]: [Beyer, Peacock & Co.], 1932. [Manufacturer’s advertisement])
Further railway construction in the colony was interrupted by the Great Depression and the Second World War. In 1948, after merging with the Tanganyika Railway, KURH was renamed East African Railways and Harbours (EAR&H), and by 1956 it had built a 336 km line from Kampala to the copper mines at Kasese in western Uganda. In 1961 the Tororo–Kampala line was straightened by building the Bukonte–Iganga–Jinja section, 78 km long. The old alignment through Mbulamuti was abandoned from 1968.
In 1960 EAR&H began converting its railways to diesel traction. The first mainline diesel locomotives to reach the network were ten Class 90 diesel-electrics (later renumbered Class 87), built by English Electric Diesels. Powered by a twelve-cylinder diesel of 1,750 hp, they were designed for a maximum axle load of 13.5 t. That called for a rather unusual running gear consisting of two eight-wheel bogies, each of which carried, as a single unit, three axles driven by individual traction motors plus a fourth carrying axle.
On 9 October 1962 Uganda became an independent state. After independence was proclaimed, EAR&H built the 342 km Soroti–Pakwach section in 1962–1964, extending it in 1969 by 70 km to the mines at Arua, close to the border with Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo). It is also worth noting that in 1965 and 1966 two new rail ferries were bought to link Uganda with Tanzania—MV Umoja and MV Uhuru. In 1969 EAR&H was renamed East African Railways (EAR).
In 1972, according to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the total length of the country’s railways was 1,240 km. The 1970s and 1980s, however, were years of severe trial for Uganda and years of decline for its railways. In 1977, under the rule of the notorious dictator Idi Amin, the country left the customs and economic union of Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. In the same year East African Railways ceased to exist, and the part of it lying on Ugandan territory was nationalized and named the Uganda Railways Corporation (URC). In 1977–1978 URC purchased a number of new diesel locomotives.
After Uganda’s defeat in the Uganda–Tanzania War and the overthrow of Idi Amin’s regime in 1979, traffic on the country’s railways halted completely for a time. The severe economic crisis and the civil war that followed came to an end only in 1986, after which signs of revival appeared in Uganda’s economic life and the working of the railway became relatively stable again.
In 1989, however, the last train ran on the Kampala–Kasese line because of the poor state of the track, and from 1998 traffic on the Tororo–Pakwach line stopped because of extremist anti-government groups operating in northern Uganda (the Pakwach–Arua section never resumed working after the events of 1979). As a result, by 2010 only the Kampala–Port Bell and Kampala–Tororo sections remained in operation, with a combined length of 260 km. There were no passenger services, and freight was worked by 11 low-powered diesel locomotives, mostly built by the German firm Henschel und Sohn (five of them allocated to Jinja depot and six to Kampala).
A freight train with two Henschel diesel locomotives at Kampala station, 26 December 2006. (Source: Wikimedia Commons. Photo: Dan Birchall)
Meanwhile, in 2005 the South African Rift Valley Railways Consortium (RVRC) won a 25-year concession to run URC and Kenya Railways. RVRC began operations on 1 November 2006.
In 2010–2013 the Tororo–Gulu section of the Arua line was restored, with an eye to the future construction of a railway to Juba, the capital of South Sudan. From 2015 the revival of passenger services in the country began, with the launch of suburban services in the capital region.
In August 2017, however, Kenya terminated the RVRC concession, citing failure to meet the obligations set out in the concession agreement, and in October of the same year Uganda followed suit, resuming independent operation of its own rail network.
International rail ferry services between Port Bell and Mwanza resumed: in 2018 the Ugandan ferry Kaawa and the Tanzanian Umoja were repaired and put back into service. This proved insufficient, however, given the growth of freight traffic between the two countries, and in February 2022, after a 17-year break, the refitted ferry Pamba entered service.
URC’s railways, which today operate some 600 km of line, are developing along two tracks. First, the existing narrow-gauge network is being rebuilt: at the end of 2022 the government of Uganda decided to allocate around €350 million to modernizing the Kampala–Tororo–Malaba section. And on 11 November 2024 Kampala railway station reopened after a complete reconstruction.
A modernized section of track near the town of Iganga, 6 January 2023. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Second, there is the construction of standard-gauge lines. In neighboring Kenya the 1,435 mm gauge Mombasa–Nairobi–Naivasha railway (SGR), built by China Road and Bridge Corporation alongside the historic narrow-gauge Uganda Railway, entered service in 2017–2019. Work has been under way since 2024 to extend it through Kisumu toward Malaba on the Ugandan border. In Uganda itself, the ground-breaking ceremony for the Malaba–Kampala railway took place on 21 November 2024 in the presence of the President of the Republic of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni. According to the Turkish construction company Yapı Merkezi, the 273 km line will cost around $3 billion.
A joint project of 1520International and the Institute for Economics and Transport Development (IETD)
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