The dome and blue-glass buildings in Dar es Salaam were still standing as a result. Fruit bats did not return to nest in the state’s thick teak trees. But even in the darker hours before our vehicle’s exit, the platform at Kamata train was filling up with people. A visual image of hand-operated points, traditional signs, and carriages scurried up in the sidings was revealed by the faint red light that poured across the sky. Then a hearty Swahili news: The Kigoma Deluxe was on its way. We were taking the 8am withdrawal, travelling a way that reaches some 800 kilometers north — the whole length of the land — to the shores of Lake Tanganyika. This is the nation’s second-deepest river, a mesmerising 400-mile longer stretch of water that is part of the dot-dot-dot of the African Great Lakes running up the middle of the globe. Our journey on the” Up Train” ( the” Down Train” travels in the opposite direction ) would be along Tanzania’s Central Line railway, or Reli ya Kati. Taking 33 hours, the coach would have us as regularly as a beat through Tanzania’s countryside on the metre-gauge monitor, or MGR, opened in 1914 by the region’s European colonisers. In a sleeper compartment of the Kigoma Deluxe, photographed by photographer Michael Turek, this piece of history wanted to be preserved before it was gone forever. After more than a century in operation, the MGR is beginning to be eclipsed by Tanzania’s new standard ( 1.435-metre ) gauge railway, the SGR — an electrified track allowing higher speeds and smoother journeys, running more-or-less parallel to the old route. The first section of the SGR route, from Dar to Dodoma, opened in August 2024, cutting the journey time from 10 hours to just over three. We watched a man carry a large block of ice onto his shoulder before driving home. Porters hustled their way through, laden with suitcases. A couple of bossy women blocked the door to our carriage with bundles of trading goods they were taking to Bujumbura, Burundi’s lakeside capital, around 100 miles north of Kigoma. Our fellow passengers were quick to introduce themselves: a maths teacher returning home to see his mother, an entrepreneur developing a business to supply fish for home aquariums, and a Seventh-Day Adventist preacher. There were three ticket options:” third class”,” second class sitting” ( with bigger seats ), and” second class sleeping” ( in six-berth compartments ). We’d booked the latter — tickets cost TSh65, 000 ( £20 ) — and the train attendant handed us pressed bedsheets as we boarded. The conductor, pleased to see foreign tourists, explained how the overhead fan worked ( it didn’t ), and with a crunch and heave, we pulled out of the station. A man carries a block of ice to a train at Kamata station in Dar es Salaam early in the morning at the Kivukoni fish market. Behind us is a section of the new Standard-Gauge Railway that is elevated. Michael TurekAt first, our view was hampered by the concrete structure of the SGR on an elevated track next to our route. Dar es Salaam appeared anything but the” Haven of Peace” its original Persian-Arabic etymology evoked as we pulled away from a coastline flanked by cargo ships. After a while, the entanglement of flyovers and cheek-by-jowl neighbourhoods started petering out as we approached the Pugu Hills on the city’s outskirts. Pugu is a hangover from a lowland coastal ecosystem with high rates of endemism: more than 30 % of its plant species can be found nowhere else, making it one of the oldest forests in the world. But travelling by train, even one as slow-moving as this, birdlife eluded me. I had to accept my containment, on this kind of journey, you can’t ask to stop. Michael TurekAs the train groaned onward, I traced the line we were taking on my map, along with its layers of history, in the station master’s office in Morogoro. The MGR traveled almost the same coast-to-lake route that has remained one of the continent’s most significant trading routes for centuries. In the 1870s, an estimated 500, 000 people walked this route each year. The region’s Arab-Swahili traders used it to transport enslaved people, ivory, rhino horn and salt ( the latter is still mined at Uvinza, close to Lake Tanganyika ). With tusks that could weigh up to 100kg each, the advancing caravans had to cross through thorn thickets to cross footpaths. In the days leading up to the European” Scramble for Africa,” more and more bizarre ideas were made about how to improve the transportation system for resource extraction, including King Leopold II of Belgium’s 1879 attempt to use imported Asian elephants to aid in the capture and training of African elephants as burdens. In other words, the opening of the Central Line railway in 1914, which took 10 years to construct ( much of it using forced labour ), was a game-changer, if only for the country’s colonists, who needed an efficient means to export the sisal, tobacco and coffee from their lucrative new plantations. The second article in a series on long-distance rail travel is full of great train journeys. For the first, see: On board Amtrak’s new 47-hour Chicago-Miami sleeper Our journey began to settle into a languorous pace. Michael joined the front-facing diesel locomotive driver while I practiced Swahili with a trainee pharmacist. By midday, a familiar scene emerged out of the flatness: the town of Morogoro, where I’d spent time two years before hiking in the nearby Uluguru Mountains. I knew this would be a good place to buy from the station platform’s fruit sellers, in Morogoro, the mountains ‘ rain shadow makes the papayas taste sweeter. From here, the train crossed the Mkata floodplain, an unyielding, over-grazed landscape” as level as a billiard table”, observed the Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley ( travelling in the wet season in the 1870s, Stanley had to wade through water up to his armpits ). Although we only saw cattle, Mkata serves as an elephant migration corridor during the winter. ” Trains hit elephants”, a local told me. ” Elephants walk where they like, when they like. They don’t read signs”. As a result, sections of the new SGR line are being protected with electrified “elephant-proof” fencing, while underpasses and culverts allow animals to cross. Later, we hissed to a stop at Kilosa station, on the brink of another range of hills. A hubbub of bags, trilling bicycles, and buckets of cassavas appeared from a leafy grove. I bought a supply of coconuts, spliced with a machete on the platform. Michael, his pockets stuffed with sticky sugar cane, disembarked to take pictures of the station, including a disused relic of the colonial-era signalling system. Kilosa vanished as we headed west in the golden light. We felt as though we were drifting through honey as the scent of flowering acacia swept through the train. Farmers were putting their onion bulbs out for drying in those areas where the landscape had extended into a wider view, a collection of copper balls that had been polished to the point of doorknobs. The silver trunks of leafless baobabs sounded like swollen candles that were melting in the heat. At Tabora, passengers traveling toward the coast disembark. Michael TurekA trader selling his goods on the platform of Tabora station. Michael TurekMichael and I headed for the canteen car, which was noisy due to people squeezing around tight tables. We avoided the stations by stocking up on beer and street food and limiting ourselves to coffee and hot chips ( frequently relying on what vendors would bring to our cabin window ). We had a conversation with other passengers as a result of the couplers bouncing high above the rails. Our journey was beginning to reveal a side of the country that is frequently overlooked by tourists flying between national parks. We were tucked between stories about angels, DJ Shinski, and John” Bulldozer” Magufuli, the late Tanzanian president who spearheaded the country’s ambitious new infrastructure agenda. The conversations were characterized by an easy rhythm, with the hurried rise and fall of Swahili and English only being abruptly broken by a thump and clunk of iron or a glib and screech of a buckle on the line. When the train’s horn sounded, a group of students yelled out. On the first day of our journey from Dar es Salaam to the Orion hotel in Tabora, the train heads out of the Mkondoa River valley toward Dodoma. Under the guise of dusk, the train entered. Dodoma seemed hollow in my opinion in comparison to Dar and Julius Nyerere’s strategic location in the middle of Tanzania to promote greater inclusion for the 120 or so ethnic groups that made up post-Independence. Michael bought some chipsi mayai ( “chips and eggs” ) from a station stall. With juicy spinach and spicy pili pili pili, I chose nyama choma, or barbecued meat. Tabora, which we woke up to early the next morning, was another story. In the 19th century, this was one of the most significant towns on the inland caravan trails, a vortex of African, Arab, Swahili, Indian and European trading interests. Last time I’d come this way, I’d stayed at the Orion, a landmark built around 1914 close enough to the station to hear the train, with a dark, club-like bar. I enjoyed wandering through the market’s shaded alleys, which grew out in a maze of booths selling everything from church suits to chickens. There was an interesting small museum on Tabora’s outskirts — a terracotta-coloured Arab tembe, or house, where Stanley and the Scottish missionary-explorer Dr David Livingstone stayed at different times. It was the end of the line that I was anticipating the most, according to Ship captain Titus Habeli, who is pictured in Kigoma on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. A friend who had traveled by boat to Lake Tanganyika had been obsessing over how the water appeared to be blue-black from a distance but had a startling clarity up close. Another friend had told me stories about his childhood on the lake’s shoreline, he described bruised skies, white lightning, three-metre waves and clattering, skin-numbing rain. Finally, as we neared Kigoma, a glimpse of silver water — and a sudden shuddering as we screeched slowly to a halt. Because Lake Tanganyika is a part of the seismically active East African Rift, I was concerned that it was an earthquake. In fact, our rear carriage had derailed a few miles short of our final destination. I pondered if this error would discourage me from traveling the train once more as the train approaches Kigoma. There’s no doubt that, for journeys between Dar and Dodoma, the new SGR train offers a faster, more comfortable alternative. Within four months of its opening, it had carried more than a million passengers, according to the Tanzania Railways Corporation. However, the German system was once beautiful, as one railroad enthusiast once said to me at Kilosa. This piece of history will now pass away as the new railroad is being constructed and our passengers are being taken. Catch the slow train as long as the old train runs the length of the MGR track, and there isn’t word on when the Dodoma-Kigoma section of the new SGR will be finished. In a world where speed means everything, there’s nothing quite like travelling back to another time. Sophy Roberts’s latest book’ A Training School for Elephants ‘ is published by Doubleday. Michael Turek’s photography relating to the journey is on show on the fifth floor of Foyles Charing Cross, London, until March 27DetailsTwo types of train run on the metre-gauge Central Line: the” Kigoma Deluxe”, which usually departs Dar es Salaam on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and the slower” Ordinary” train, which departs on Sunday afternoon and arrives in the early hours of Tuesday. ” Second class sleeping” tickets on the Deluxe cost around £20 per person one-way ( passengers can buy six tickets in order to have their own compartment ), see eticketing. trc. co. tz. Tickets for the SGR are available at sgrticket. trc. Follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning.
Great rail adventures: next call for the slower train across Tanzania
