There can be no doubt how much Mombasa’s new railway is going to alter the outlook of the East African port city, attendees at the 16th Intermodal Africa heard repeatedly.

The Mombasa-to-Nairobi standard gauge railway runs from the centre of the port to the capital Nairobi and adds substantially to Mombasa’s facilities. It is currently very close to completion, being 98% finished.

“We have some 2.5km (of track) in the port,” Kenya Ports Authority officials said, adding that there are three loading points in the port. The railway brings big consequences not just for the port but for the region as a whole.

“This will be a game-changer for trade facilitation in the region,” Catherine Mturi-Wairi, managing director of the Kenya Ports Authority (KPA), told the conference.

First, it will allow four trains a day to leave the port. “It is expected to move more than 1,000 TEUs per day,” Mtari-Wairi said. That calculation might already be on the low side as Kenya Railways is planning on five cargo trains a day and two passenger trains which, combined, use only a third of the new line’s capacity.

“Optimally, the line can do 17 trains a day,” Beatrice Akun, an assistant railway track engineer for Kenya Railways who briefed Intermodal Africa on the facility, told Asia Cargo News in an interview.

Secondly, they will be moved in a much timelier manner with the railway promising a journey of six hours as opposed to the current 10 – and much more quickly than the reported 18 hours by truck.

In a twist, some freight trains will be express and run straight through to Nairobi, while others can offload at intermediate stations. While the first locomotives were scheduled to arrive at the port in time for Christmas, the first trial run is scheduled for March 2017, with full operations planned for June or July.

All this will bring big advantages for Mombasa. Currently, only 4% of containers leave Mombasa by train; the new port connection will raise that to 20% or 30%. This makes Mombasa both so much more obviously intermodal and a world-class-type port.

Initially, there will be just two freight stations on the Mombasa-Nairobi route, Mombasa Port and the Nairobi South Hub, and both are being stepped up.

“We are expanding the ICD (at Nairobi South) to take more containers. We will expand from 180,000 per annum now to 585,000,” Akun said.

Kenya Port Authority officials make a similar point about Mombasa, but give only a few more details. “We will have industries and value-adding as from next year,” one official told Asia Cargo News. This is separate from government plans for Kenya’s first special economic zone at Dongo Kundu, close to the port.

The railway is not simply a faster connection between the Mombasa and Nairobi – it’s also the beginning of something more extensive, as there are plans for an onward line to Malaba on the border with Uganda, Akun said.

Construction on the Nairobi to Malaba section is expected to begin shortly, and should take 54 months to complete, Akun added. By then, it is hoped that Uganda will have built the connection on that side of the border. “That’s a totally new corridor” Akun said.

The railway will allow Mombasa to serve an arc of Central and East Africa including Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, as well as the northeastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As if to underscore this, the Port of Mombasa is also expanding. “Phase two of the second container terminal is going on now as per schedule. From mid-next year, the construction should start,” one KPA official told Asia Cargo News. It is scheduled for completion in 2018.

“Phase three will come later on,” Mturi-Wairi said, suggesting the original 2018 completion date might be moved a bit. Once the second container terminal is completed, it will make the Port of Mombasa the largest port in the region by having created a further 900 metres to the current 840 metres. That length gives it three berths of 350, 300 and 250 metres.

In total, the second container terminal will have a 100-hectare site and the capacity to handle 1.5 million TEUs. The significance is not so much in the new hardware but in what it allows to happen. For KPA officials, this means more transhipment. “We expect to see growth,” said one.

By Michael Mackey

Correspondent | Mombasa