Zambia Railways

Main line

The 1,067 mm (3 ft 6 in) Cape gauge ZR main line was built during British administration as part of the vision of the Cape-Cairo railway promoted by Cecil Rhodes. His British South Africa Company partnered with a number of railway companies to build the first line north from South Africa, reaching Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia in 1899. From there it was extended north to the coal mines at Hwange in 1903, which supplied power for the railway.

The economic spur to continue going north was to access the lead and zinc mine of Broken Hill (now Kabwe) and the surface copper mines of Katanga. From Hwange, the railway reached Victoria Falls in 1904, just across the Zambezi from (then) North-Western Rhodesia, part of the future Zambia. However before Victoria Falls Bridge was completed in late 1905, the first railway constructed in Zambia was the 150-km Livingstone-Kalomo line completed in early 1905, with oxen-hauled wagons. Then a single locomotive was conveyed in pieces by cableway across the Zambezi gorge. This enabled trains to operate as far as Kalomo before connection from the main line from the south.

Further construction was carried out by the Mashonaland Railway company, including in 1906 the 427-metre long Kafue Railway Bridge, the longest in the Rhodesias. Kabwe was reached the same year. The line was extended again to Ndola in 1909, crossing the Belgian Congo border at Sakania in 1910, and in the same year the Katange Railway Company line reached Elizabethville (now Lubumbashi), where the first Katangan copper mines opened.

In 1911 North-Western Rhodesia was merged with North-Eastern Rhodesia to form Northern Rhodesia. Lines were extended from Ndola to the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt mines as underground copper mines opened there from the late 1920s onwards. By this time the railway was called the Beira and Mashonaland and Rhodesia Railway, but from 1927, the name Rhodesia Railways was used.

At the end of 1963 the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was dissolved pending independence of the three member states from the UK, and federal assets were divided up. Rhodesia Railways was divided between Northern and Southern Rhodesia as a jointly-managed shared asset, and this status continued when Zambia became independent in October 1964. In 1965, Rhodesia Railways in Zambia was the second largest industry in the country after the copper mines. The network north of the Zambezi was just over 1000 km, had 7000 employees with a payroll of nearly £5 million sterling, freight revenue of about £10 million sterling and carried well over 1 million passengers a year.

In 1967, spurred by the Rhodesian UDI crisis, Zambia split its railways off from Rhodesia Railways, and Zambia Railways came into being. It inherited about 80–90 locomotives based at Kabwe, as well as passenger coaches and freight wagons..

Mulobezi Railway

Zambia Railways operates the Mulobezi Railway, a branch line from Livingstone, built as a private timber line in the 1920s.

Njanji Commuter Service/Mulungushi Railway (Lusaka)

Njanji Commuter Service (NCS), initially called Mulungushi Railway, was a low-cost cape gauge urban railway in Lusaka running about 13 km between Chilenji 15.451°S 28.327°E / -15.451; 28.327 in the inner south-east and George Township/Industrial area 15.390°S 28.245°E / -15.390; 28.245 in the inner north-west via the central mainline station. It was built by the then state-owned mining company Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM) for the government, and opened in 1991. The track from Chilenji to the main line was new, the rest used existing lines and freight sidings. ZCCM used the same locomotives and coaches for the line as for their mine worker trains, shown here at the Nkana Mine. The coaches were made locally by attaching Tata bus bodies to mine wagon bases. In 1995 with the privatisation of ZCCM it was transferred to Zambia Railways, which renamed it Njanji Commuter Service.