East Africa goes back 45 years to find its great railway future... or is it all a dream?

One report declared it would “kickstart other rail projects in neighbouring countries, turning Tanzania’s line into the gateway to the Indian Ocean.”

In October, Uganda stepped up onto the railway podium. The Kampala government and Turkish construction firm Yapi Merkezi signed a contract to build the first section of a planned 1,700-kilometre electric rail line.

The line will run from the capital Kampala to Malaba at the border with Kenya, connecting landlocked Uganda to its neighbour's rail network and on to the port of Mombasa.

At the start of November, Kenya showed up, with the government announcing it is set to spend KSh648 billion ($5 billion) on the construction of a 475-kilometre extension of its SGR from Naivasha to the Malaba border with Uganda.

The East African Community plans to develop a 6,220-kilometre SGR line to connect its eight member states, according to an announcement at the ministerial session of the 19th EAC Sectoral Council on Transport, Communications, and Meteorology, in Arusha last month October.

According to the EAC’s Deputy Secretary General of Infrastructure, Productive, Social and Political Sectors Andrea Aguer Ariik Maleuth, the region is 18 per cent there: “A total of 1,120 kilometres of SGR is already operational in Kenya and Tanzania, with an additional 1,100 kilometres under construction in Tanzania,” he said.

East Africans talk about railways far more than they build them, but at least it is dreaming. It is an old dream, and it was first brought to fruition by the colonialists before independence. And it was grander than its modern-day reincarnation.

On May 1, 1948, the East African High Commission, the colonial-era forerunner of the EAC, merged the Kenya and Uganda Railways and Harbours with the Tanganyika Railway and created the East African Railways and Harbours Corporation (EAR&H)

Thus, the organisation not only managed the railway network but also the harbours and inland shipping services on various lakes like Victoria, Kyoga, and Albert, as well as along the Nile River.

Its services connected cities like Mombasa to Nairobi, Kampala, and Dar es Salaam, with various branch lines extending into the hinterlands. You would take a first-class cabinet on the train in Nairobi, and wake up hours later in Kampala.

EAR&H managed ports in Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, and Tanga. In 1961 it launched the new Lake Victoria ferry RMS Victoria. In the same year, a much-acclaimed documentary "The Permanent Way" captured the extent of the railway's significance to the East African economy.

Read: Tanzania reignites railway bonanza while Kenya, Uganda in joint-funding dilemma

In 1965 and 1966, EAR&H introduced train ferry services across Lake Victoria with ships like MV Umoja and MV Uhuru. This service was innovative for its time, allowing railway cars to be transported by water, and enhancing connectivity in the region.

Then that fiery monster, politics, intervened, and in 1977 Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda dissolved the EAC after many fights. As happened with East African Airways, every country grabbed and ran away with the pieces that were in its territory.

They formed the Kenya Railways Corporation, the Tanzania Railways Corporation, and the Uganda Railways Corporation.

In snapping up the spoils, Tanzania came off the worst, and Kenya got the lion’s share. Like the partner who gets the worst deal in a divorce, coming off with the wheelbarrow and old sofa as the other takes the house and car, it soured Tanzania’s heart, making it distrustful and resentful of the EAC project. Only lately has its heart mellowed, and in building the region’s first electric railway system, it is having a good last laugh.

It all went to the dogs, from there. A few years later, the great Kenyan-born British crooner Roger Whittaker sang an homage to the railway titled “The Good Old EAR&H”. It partly went:

Oh the good old EAR&H would get me there on time

Those mighty engines rolling down the line

And no boy ever had a railway quite as fine as mine

Now when I was a kid I used to play

While the train would rock and roll and swing and sway

And as she pulled us up the grade, slowing all the way

Oh this is what the wheels would have to say

We would sing along with what they had to say

They’d say no I can’t, no I can’t, no I can’t, no I can’t, no I can’t, no I can’t again

Now when I was a kid I’d ride the train

That took me up to school and home again

At the end of school aboard that train, unholy joy would reign

Now somehow it just don’t seem the same

They’re using diesel fuel to pull that train

The old wood burners sitting down in a museum

Oh it’s sad to see them stand in a museum

So, East Africa is here today. It has gone back 45 years, to find its railway future.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. X(Twitter)@cobbo3