Africa’s Lost Railway

Running from Egypt down the vast African continent, the Cape to Cairo railway was to be the longest railway route in the world. It was the most ambitious scheme of the nineteenth century: longer than the Trans-Siberian, the railway was a construction project on the scale of the pyramids or the Taj Mahal, and was part of Cecil Rhodes’ grand design to cement British control of the whole of the African continent. Although never completed, the idea of this grandiose imperial scheme still has a hold on the imagination. Now though, it has come to represent the outsize influence on Africa of another foreign power: China. Part travelogue, part history, part love letter to the railways, award-winning transport export Christian Wolmar explores the route that might have been, and the changing continent it tried to shape.