Africa has never had a railway running its full length. The closest it came was a Victorian scheme that ran out of track before crossing the swamps of what is now South Sudan.

First proposed by a British newspaper editor in 1874, the idea was made famous by Cecil Rhodes, who had the mining capital and chartered company to begin building northward from the Cape of Good Hope.

Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896, envisioned a continuous strip of British territory from Cape Town to Cairo. A railway and telegraph would connect it, allowing Britain to move troops, administer territory, establish settlements, and exploit mineral deposits.

The proposed route stretched roughly 10 500km. It inspired the famous 1892 Punch cartoon depicting Rhodes as a literal colossus, straddling Africa, an image of British imperial ambition at its height.

Building from Both Ends

A surprising amount was built. Construction advanced from opposite ends of the continent, and by the 1920s much of the distance was covered by railways, although the network remained disconnected.

The southern route passed through Kimberley, Mahikeng, and Bulawayo, reaching Victoria Falls in 1904. Rhodes had died two years earlier. To continue construction, workers transported a dismantled locomotive across the gorge using pulleys and reassembled it while the bridge was being built.

The railway eventually extended into Northern Rhodesia (today Zambia) and Katanga’s copper country in the Belgian Congo, reaching Kindu on the Congo River.

The northern network was older. Egypt's Alexandria-to-Cairo railway opened in 1856. During the reconquest of Sudan, Lord Kitchener built a military railway south across the Nubian Desert towards Khartoum.

Kitchener had recently met Rhodes and adopted the same 1 067mm track gauge used in southern Africa. However, even the northern network remained incomplete, with a river ferry connecting sections near Aswan.

Three Obstacles

The first obstacle was imperial competition. Germany’s acquisition of East African territory in 1891 interrupted Britain’s desired north-to-south corridor. Belgium’s control of the Congo complicated matters further.

Germany’s defeat in the First World War brought Tanganyika (today Tanzania) under British administration, removing one political obstacle. However, Britain lacked the money and enthusiasm to complete the scheme. The Great Depression and Second World War further undermined its prospects.

The second obstacle was geography. Between Sudan and Uganda lay the Sudd, an enormous wetland where the Nile spreads across unstable, waterlogged ground. Building permanent railway embankments through it presented formidable engineering challenges. The remaining gap has been estimated at roughly 2 000km.

The third obstacle was railway gauge, the distance between two rails.

Southern Africa and Sudan used 1 067mm gauge, East Africa adopted 1 000mm, and Egypt used 1 435mm. Trains could not simply travel between these networks without changes of equipment or transhipment of cargo.

Railways Built Sideways

The deeper problem was commercial.

Colonial railways were generally designed to transport minerals, agricultural products, and timber from the interior to coastal ports. They ran east or west towards the sea, rather than north or south through the continent.

The Benguela Railway illustrates the problem. Begun in 1903 and fully opened in 1931, it connected the Atlantic port of Lobito in Angola with the Congolese railway network at Tenke.

Built to the same gauge as the southern railway, it offered Katanga’s copper producers a relatively direct route to the Atlantic.

That undermined the commercial logic of transporting copper thousands of kilometres north towards Cairo. Coastal connections offered shorter journeys and access to established shipping routes.

The Cape-to-Cairo scheme consequently struggled to attract the commercial demand necessary to justify completing its most difficult sections.

What Remains

Much of the original railway network survives in disconnected sections, although there has never been a continuous Cape-to-Cairo service.

One important addition came in the 1970s with the Chinese-built TAZARA railway, connecting Zambia to the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam. Intended to reduce Zambia’s dependence on routes through white-ruled Rhodesia and South Africa, it provided another major connection between southern and eastern Africa.

Plans for completing the remaining gaps have circulated for decades, but none has produced the continuous transcontinental railway Rhodes envisioned.

The central problem is no longer simply the Sudd, political borders, or incompatible tracks. It is whether sufficient demand exists to justify a railway running the length of Africa.

Rhodes imagined an imperial corridor that would transform movement across the continent. Instead, the railway map developed around routes connecting inland producers with international markets.

More than a century later, the Cape-to-Cairo railway remains unfinished. Its missing sections reveal how commercial geography ultimately prevailed over imperial ambition.