Cape to Cairo Railway
It was largely based on the vision of Cecil Rhodes, an attempt to connect African colonies of the British Empire through a continuous railway line from Cape Town, South Africa to Cairo, Egypt.
[3] The original proposal for a Cape Town to Cairo railway was made in 1874 by Edwin Arnold, then the editor of The Daily Telegraph, which was joint sponsor of the expedition by Henry Morton Stanley to Africa to discover the course of the Congo River.
After a ferry link up on the Nile, the railway continues in Sudan from Wadi Halfa to Khartoum at the 1,067 mm (3 ft 6 in) Cape gauge; see Northern Africa Railroad Development.
In 1891, Germany secured the strategically critical territory of German East Africa, which, along with the mountainous rainforest of the Belgian Congo, precluded the building of a Cape to Cairo railway.
In 1916, during World War I, British, African, and Indian soldiers won the Tanganyika Territory (now modern-day Tanzania) from the German Empire.
The southern section was completed during British rule before the First World War and has an interconnecting system of national railways using the Cape gauge of 1,067 mm (3 ft 6 in).
Construction started from Cape Town and went parallel to the Great North Road to Kimberley through a part of Botswana to Bulawayo.
[citation needed][6] After World War II, the decolonisation of Africa and the establishment of independent countries removed the colonial rationale for the project and increased the difficulties, effectively ending it.
Eventually these networks were linked, so that today there is a continuous rail connection between Kampala, Uganda, on Lake Victoria to the coastal cities of Mombasa in Kenya and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.
From Dar es Salaam, a 1,860 km rail link to Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia was built from 1970 to 1975 as a turnkey project financed and supported by China.
John Crowley's science fiction novella Great Work of Time features an alternative history in which the British Empire survived to the end of the 20th century and beyond, and the Cape to Cairo Railway was completed.
This map shows the chain of colonies from the Cape to Cairo through which the railway would run. From 1916, Tanganyika Territory was added, filling in the gap.
