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Africa by train


Africa by train

A train in Zambia.
A train in Zambia.
Passenger railroads in Africa are sparse and the majority are short and within one country. South Africa and Egypt are the two countries with significant passenger railroad services. There is also a handful of interconnected railroads running from Botswana through Zimbabwe & Zambia to Tanzania (which will connect to Rwanda by 2012). Morocco has two modern, fast train lines connecting most major cities. In Kenya, there is a Mombasa-Nairobi-Kisumu line which is popular for wildlife spotting. Namibia has a line running from Swakopmund to Windhoek and south to near the South African border. There are also a handful of very old, slow trains in Africa: Wadi Halfa-Khartoum, Sudan (with a short ferry on Lake Aswan, you can continue north to Cairo); Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso-Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire; Dakar, Senegal-Bamako, Mali (stopped running summer 2009); a couple trains in the DRC; and short lines in Cameroon & Gabon. The Chinese are currently building railroad lines in Angola which should open in the next few years. For a unique experience, you can ride the longest train in the world in Mauritania in either the caboose or atop open iron ore carriages.

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Africa Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.

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