last call for the slow train across Tanzania

Dawn hadn’t yet broken over the minarets and blue-glass towers of downtown Dar es Salaam. Nor had the fruit bats returned to roost in the city’s bushy neem trees. But even in the dark hours before our train’s departure, the platform at Kamata station was filling up with people. The faint pink light spilling across the sky revealed a cinematic scene of hand-operated points, antique signage and carriages shunted up in the sidings. Then a crackling announcement in Swahili: the Kigoma Deluxe was ready to board.

We were taking the 8am departure, travelling a route that reaches some 800 miles west — the full width of the country — to the shores of Lake Tanganyika. This is the world’s second-deepest lake, a mesmerising 400-mile long stretch of water that is part of the dot-dot-dot of the African Great Lakes running up the middle of the continent. 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 train would carry us as rhythmically as a heartbeat through Tanzania’s hinterland on the metre-gauge track, or MGR, opened in 1914 by the region’s German colonisers.

My travelling companion, photographer Michael Turek, wanted to capture this piece of history 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 heave a large block of ice on to his shoulder to carry it to the dining car. 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. 

At first, our view was impeded by the concrete structure of the SGR on an elevated track adjacent to our route, its glistening newness indicative of the bold ambitions of one of Africa’s fastest-growing cities. As we pulled away from a coastline flanked by cargo ships, Dar es Salaam appeared to be anything but the “Haven of Peace” its original Persian-Arabic etymology evoked.

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 one of the oldest forests in the world, a hangover of a lowland coastal ecosystem with high rates of endemism: more than 30 per cent of its plant species are found nowhere else. 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.

As the train groaned onwards, I traced the line we were taking on my map, along with its layers of history. The MGR followed almost the same coast-to-lake route that for centuries had functioned as one of the most significant trading lines on the continent. 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).

The advancing caravans had to cut footpaths through thorn thickets, carrying tusks that could weigh up to 100kg each. In the lead-up to the European “Scramble for Africa”, increasingly bizarre ideas were mooted to improve the transport system for resource extraction, including an 1879 attempt by King Leopold II of Belgium to use imported Asian elephants to help round up and train African elephants as beasts of burden. 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.

Our journey began to settle into a languorous pace. While I practised my Swahili with a trainee pharmacist, Michael joined the driver in the diesel locomotive up front. 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). We only saw cattle but Mkata is a seasonal migration corridor for elephants. “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. Traders appeared from a leafy grove — a hubbub of bags, trilling bicycles and buckets of cassavas. 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.

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We rolled out west in golden light, and Kilosa faded from view. With the scent of flowering acacia floating through the train, it felt as if we were drifting through honey. In those places where the landscape flattened out into a longer view, farmers were putting their onion bulbs out to dry — a collage of copper balls as finely polished as doorknobs. The silver trunks of leafless baobabs looked like swollen candles melting in the heat.

Michael and I made for the canteen car, noisy with travellers who squeezed around narrow tables. We stuck to coffee and hot chips (stocking up on beer and street food when we reached the stations, often relying on what vendors would bring to our cabin window). Against the snap and grind of couplers bouncing above the rails, we got talking with other passengers.

Between stories about angels, DJ Shinski and John “Bulldozer” Magufuli — the late Tanzanian president who drove the nation’s ambitious new infrastructure agenda — our journey was beginning to reveal a side of the country that’s often missed by tourists flying between national parks. The conversations found an easy rhythm, the puttering rise and fall of English and Swahili broken only by a sudden thump and clunk of iron, or the glide and screech of a buckle on the line. A group of students whooped when the train sounded its horn.

After Kilosa, we trundled through the sizzling heat of the Ugogo region towards Tanzania’s capital, Dodoma. The train pulled in under the cover of dusk. To my mind, Dodoma felt hollow compared with the cut and thrust of Dar, its strategic location in the middle of the country chosen by Julius Nyerere in 1974 to encourage greater inclusiveness for the 120 or so ethnic groups that made up post-Independence Tanzania. Michael bought some chipsi mayai (“chips and eggs”) from a station stall. I opted for nyama choma, or barbecued meat, served with juicy spinach and spicy pili pili.

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 liked wandering the shaded alleys of the market, which fanned out in a labyrinth of stalls selling everything from chickens to church suits. 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.

But it was the end of the line that I was looking forward to the most. A friend who’d sailed Lake Tanganyika had talked about it obsessively, explaining how the water appeared 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. I worried that it was an earthquake; Lake Tanganyika is part of the seismically active East African Rift. In fact, our rear carriage had derailed a few miles short of our final destination.

While the driver and engineers spent the next two hours working out how to uncouple the offending carriage, I wondered if this mishap would put me off riding the train again. 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.

But as one railway enthusiast had remarked to me at Kilosa: “The German system was once beautiful. Now the new railway is being built and our passengers will be taken, this piece of history will go to sleep.”

For as long as the old train still runs the length of the MGR track — and there is no news yet of its retirement, nor of when the Dodoma-Kigoma stretch of the new SGR will be completed — I’d say catch the slow train while you can. 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 27

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