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Sudan
Railroads
The country had two railroads. The main system, Sudan Railways,
which was operated by the government-owned Sudan Railways Corporation,
provided services to most of the country's production and consumption
centers. The other railroad, the Gezira Light Railway, was owned
by the Sudan Gezira Board and served the Gezira Scheme and its
Manaqil Extension. Railroads dominated commercial transport, although
competition from the highways has been increasing rapidly. The
preeminence of the railroad system was based on historical developments
that led to its construction as an adjunct to military operations,
although the first line, built in the mid-1870s from Wadi Halfa
to a point about fifty-four kilometers upstream on the Nile River,
was initially a commercial undertaking. This line, which had not
proved viable commercially, was extended in the mid-1880s and
again in the mid-1890s to support the Anglo-Egyptian military
campaigns against the Mahdiyah (see The Mahdiyah, 1884-98 , ch.
1). Of little other use, it was abandoned in 1905.
The first segment of the present-day Sudan Railways, from Wadi
Halfa to Abu Hamad, was also a military undertaking; it was built
by the British for use in General Herbert Kitchener's drive against
the Mahdiyah in the late 1890s. The line was pushed to Atbarah
during the campaign and after the defeat of the Mahdiyah in 1898
was continued to Khartoum, which it reached on the last day of
1899. The line was built to 1.067-meter-gauge track specifications,
the result apparently of Kitchener's pragmatic use of the rolling
stock and rails of that gauge from the old line. This gauge was
used in all later Sudanese mainline construction.
The line opened a trade route from central Sudan through Egypt
to the Mediterranean and beyond. It became uneconomical, however,
because of the distance and the need for transshipment via the
Nile, and in 1904 construction of a new line from Atbarah to the
Red Sea was undertaken. In 1906 the new line reached recently
built Port Sudan to provide a direct connection between Khartoum
and ocean-going transport.
During the same decade, a line was also built from Khartoum southward
to Sannar, the heart of the cotton-growing region of Al Jazirah.
A westward continuation reached Al Ubayyid, then the country's
second largest city and center of gum arabic production, in 1911.
In the north, a branch line was built from near Abu Hamad to Kuraymah
that tied the navigable stretch of the Nile between the fourth
and third cataracts into the transport system. Traffic in this
case, however, was largely inbound to towns along the river, a
situation that still prevailed in 1990.
In the mid- and late 1920s, a spur of the railroad was built
from Taqatu Hayya, a point on the main line 200 kilometers southwest
of Port Sudan, southward to the cotton-producing area near Kassala,
then on to the grain region of Al Qadarif, and finally to a junction
with the main line at Sannar. Much of the area's traffic, which
formerly had passed through Khartoum, has since moved over this
line directly to Port Sudan.
The final spurt of railroad construction began in the 1950s.
It included extension of the western line to Nyala (1959) in Darfur
Province and of a southwesterly branch to Waw (1961), southern
Sudan's second largest city, located in Bahr al Ghazal Province.
This essentially completed the Sudan Railways network, which in
1990 totaled about 4,800 route kilometers.
Conversion of Sudan Railways to diesel fuel started in the late
1950s, but a few mainline steam locomotives continued in use in
1990, serving lines having lighter weight rails. Through the 1960s,
the railroads essentially had a monopoly on transportation of
export and import trade, and operations were profitable. In the
early 1970s, losses were experienced, and, although the addition
of new diesel equipment in 1976 was followed by a return to profitability,
another downturn had occurred by the end of the decade. The losses
were attributed in part to inflationary factors, the lack of spare
parts, and the continuation of certain lines characterized by
only light traffic, but retained for economic development needs
and for social reasons.
The chief cause of the downturn appeared to have been loss of
operational efficiency. Worker productivity had declined. For
example, repair of locomotives was so slow that only about half
of the total number were usually operational. Freight car turnaround
time had lengthened considerably, and the reported slowness of
management to meet growing competition from road transport was
also a major factor. The road system, although generally more
expensive, was used increasingly for low-volume, high-value goods
because it could deliver more rapidly--two or three days from
Port Sudan to Khartoum, compared with seven or eight days for
express rail freight and up to two weeks for ordinary freight.
At the end of the 1980s, moreover, only 1 to 2 percent of freight
trains arrived on time. The gradual erosion of freight traffic
was evident in the drop from more than 3 million tons carried
annually at the beginning of the 1970s to about 2 million tons
at the end of the decade. The 1980s also saw a steady erosion
of tonnage as a result of a combination of inefficient management,
union intransigence, the failure of agricultural projects to meet
production goals, the dearth of spare parts, and the continuing
civil war.
Despite the rapidly growing use of roads, the railroads have
remained of paramount importance because of their ability to move
at lower cost the large volume of agricultural exports and to
transport inland the increasing imports of heavy capital equipment
and construction materials for development, such as requirements
for oil exploration and drilling operations. Efforts to improve
the rail system reported in the late 1970s and the 1980s included
laying heavier rails, repairing locomotives, purchasing new locomotives,
modernizing signaling equipment, expanding training facilities,
and improving locomotive and rolling-stock repair facilities.
One project would double-track the line from Port Sudan to the
junction of the branch route to Sannar, thus in effect doubling
the Port Sudan-Khartoum rail line. Substantial assistance has
been furnished for these and other stock and track improvement
projects by foreign governments and organizations, including the
European Development Fund, the Development Finance Company, the
AFESD, the International Development Association, Britain, France,
and Japan. Implementation of much of this work has been hampered
by political instability in the 1980s, debt, the dearth of hard
currency, the shortage of spare parts, and import controls. Railroads
were estimated in mid-1989 to be operating at less than 20 percent
of capacity.
The Gezira Light Railway, one of the largest light railroads
in Africa, evolved from tracks laid in the 1920s' construction
of the canals for the Gezira Scheme. At the time, the railroad
had about 135 route kilometers of 1.6096-meter-gauge track. As
the size of the project area increased, the railroad was extended
and by the mid-1960s consisted of a complex system totaling 716
route kilometers. Its primary purpose has been to serve the farm
area by carrying cotton to ginneries and fertilizers, fuel, food,
and other supplies to the villages in the area. Operations usually
have been suspended during the rainy season.
Data as of June 1991
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