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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Sudan
Index
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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