Rwanda Railway
The Rwanda Railway was a railway project that was supposed to connect the central railway line of the German East Africa colony , the Tanganyika Railway , with the north-west of the colony, today's Rwanda .
The Rwanda Railway was to leave the Tanganyika Railway in Tabora and lead over 481 km to the Kagera Nile , which in turn was navigable and was supposed to bring traffic to the railway. It was supposed to cross the watershed between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria at an altitude of 1550 m and would have required a considerable amount of engineering structures.
As an alternative to this railway construction, the extension of the Usambara Railway to the west, beyond Arusha to the shores of Lake Victoria, was considered, from where traffic with Rwanda would then have been by ship. The profitability calculations and military considerations, however, clearly spoke in favor of the Rwanda railway. This was due both to their better development function and the more favorable topography of the terrain to be crossed.
The construction of the railway was estimated at around 47 million marks . The costs were to be financed by the fact that the better traffic development they made possible would have enabled the German administration to levy taxes . From a state perspective, the railway would have financed itself. In addition, there was the expectation of considerable export potential from the then well-developed agriculture of Rwanda and Urundi (today: Burundi ). The money for the start of the railway construction was approved by an extraordinary budget in 1914 in the amount of 17 million marks.
The preparatory work for the railway construction began in 1913. A construction period of three to four years was expected. The superstructure was completed at the outbreak of the First World War over a length of 66 kilometers from Tabora. The war brought the project to a standstill, but surveying work for the railway continued until 1916 and, for economic reasons, 40 kilometers of the route from Tabora to the north were completed during the war. For lack of rail construction could not but be continued the built route shortened the days' march of support columns on the street Tabora- Muansa by two days. The Belgians, as the new colonial power after the First World War, dismantled the tracks again.
After the war, German East Africa was divided: for the greater part, Tanganyika , Great Britain received a mandate from the League of Nations . Rwanda and Urundi fell to Belgium . The British mandate administration was no longer interested in connecting Rwanda and Urundi. Their interest was much more directed towards the flow of goods towards their own colonies. It therefore added a branch line to the Tanganyika Railway from Tabora to Mwanza (379 km) to the south bank of Lake Victoria.
See also
literature
- Franz Baltzer: The colonial railways with a special focus on Africa . Berlin 1916. Reprint: Leipzig 2008, p. 57ff., ISBN 978-3-8262-0233-9 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Innocent Kabagema: Rwanda under German colonial rule 1899-1916 , European Publishing House of Science, Frankfurt am Main 1993, pages 114, 117-119.
- ^ Heinrich Schnee : German East Africa in World Wars , Verlag Quelle & Meyer, Leipzig 1920, pages 160–161.
- ↑ Hans Georg Steltzer: The Germans and their colonial empire . Societäts-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1984, page 166, ISBN 3 7973 0416 1 .