History of rail transport in Zambia

The British South Africa Company (BSAC) was responsible for building the Rhodesian railway system in the period of primary construction which ended in 1911, when the main line through Northern Rhodesia reached the Congo border and the Katanga copper mines.

However, Rhodes was as much a capitalist in his motivation as a visionary, and when little gold was found in Mashonaland in Southern Rhodesia, he accepted that the scheme to reach Lake Tanganyika had no economic justification.

Railways built by private companies without government subsidies need enough of the type of traffic that can pay high freight rates to recover their construction costs.

The agricultural products that fueled much of Rhodesia's early economic growth could not provide this traffic; large quantities of minerals could.

However, in the early period of railway construction, BSAC obtained finance from South African companies including Consolidated Gold Fields and De Beers in which Rhodes was a dominant force.

The railway arrived in the future Zambia early in 1905, when the 150 km (93 mi) long Livingstone–Kalomo line was built in advance of completion in September of that year of the Victoria Falls Bridge from the then Southern Rhodesia to Livingstone.

Initially, the Congo Free State had concluded that Katanga's copper deposits were not rich enough to justify the capital cost of building a railway to the coast, but expeditions between 1899 and 1901 proved their value.

Even after the Congo route was opened, up to a third of Katanga's copper went to Beira, and the mine's supply of coal and coke mostly came from Wankie, the cheapest available source.

This prevented the legislatures of Northern or Southern Rhodesia from introducing competition or exerting pressure on the BSAC-controlled railways to reduce rates without British government sanction.

The government of the People's Republic of China sponsored construction of the railway specifically to eliminate Zambia's economic dependence on Rhodesia and South Africa.

However, it has never been profitable and more recently it has suffered from competition from road transport (such as the Trans–Caprivi Highway and Walvis Bay Corridor to Namibia) and the re-orientation of Zambia's economic links towards South Africa after the end of apartheid.

[9] As of October 2008, a Tanzanian newspaper described the TAZARA's condition as being "on the verge of collapse due to financial crisis", with the operator being three months late on paying worker's wages and most of its 12 locomotives being out of service.