Tororo – Arua Mine railway line
| Tororo-Arua Mine | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Route length: | 573 km | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gauge : | 1000 mm ( meter gauge ) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Tororo – Arua Mine railway line is only a part of a railway line in Uganda.
Geographical location
It branches off the Uganda Railway in a northerly direction just before the border with Kenya and runs in a north-westerly direction through the interior of the country.
history
The line was put into operation in sections from 1929 after the Uganda Railway had crossed the border into Uganda from Kenya in 1926 and reached its provisional end point Soroti (km 161.2). From 1962 the line was extended, reached Pakwach East in 1964 and was extended in 1969 to its end point Arua . But as early as 1979 the rail traffic had to be stopped due to the civil war under the government and after the departure of the dictator Idi Amin . From 1986 he was then gradually resumed to Pakwach East. But even now the line suffered particularly from attacks on trains, so that passenger traffic had to be stopped again in 1993 and freight traffic in 1998. The latter was resumed in 2004, but only as far as Opit . The section between Opit and Pakwach East was no longer used.
After the previously unused route had been cleared of vegetation and repaired, a freight train coming from Mombasa reached Gulu for the first time on September 14, 2013 . Unfortunately, it stayed with this hopeful new beginning. Currently (2019) this line is out of service, but it is to be rebuilt in meter gauge soon. It is also planned to use the route for the transport of Ugandan oil and to build or expand it in the direction of Juba in order to connect South Sudan to the East African rail network.
operator
The line was initially built and operated by the Kenya and Uganda Railway (KUR), which was renamed the Kenya and Uganda Railway and Harbors (KUR & H) in 1927 . Subsequently, from 1948 on it belonged to the East African Railways and Harbors Administration (EAR & H), which was renamed East African Railways (EAR) in 1969 . After the customs and economic union between Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania broke up in 1977 due to the widely divergent political and economic systems, the part of the joint railway that was on Ugandan territory was renamed the Uganda Railway Cooperation (URC). On November 1, 2006, the URC was taken over by the South African Rift Valley Railways Company , which operated the route. With the termination of the contract with the South African Rift Valley Railways Company in September 2017, the Uganda Railway Cooperation (URC) took over the route again. Currently (2019) there is no operation here, a reconstruction in meter gauge is being prepared.
literature
- Neil Robinson: World Rail Atlas and historical summary. Vol. 7: North, East and Central Africa. World Rail Atlas Ltd., 2009, ISBN 978-954-92184-3-5 , pp. 78-80, map 43.
- Matthias Hille: The railroad in Uganda - aged trains on shaky tracks . Fern-Express issue 2/2018, pp. 10–15.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Uganda's Northern line reopens. railwaygazette.com, accessed September 22, 2014