The TAZARA turns 50: Riding the railway that bridges Tanzania and Zambia

Riding the troubled railway line between Tanzania and Zambia as China moves to rebuild it.

A girl runs on the platform at Mlimba station in central Tanzania [Kang-Chun Cheng/Al Jazeera]

Published On 28 Dec 2025

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to Kapiri Mposhi, Zambia — In Dar es Salaam’s train station, hundreds of passengers sat amid piles of luggage as a listless breeze blew through the open windows. Shortly before their scheduled 3:50pm departure on the Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority’s (TAZARA) Mukuba Express train, an update crackled over the tannoy: the train would be leaving two hours late.

A collective groan rippled through the crowd, and under the soaring roof of the station, pigeons darted back and forth, disappearing into holes left from rotted-out ceiling tiles. But nobody was really surprised. Given the train’s reputation for unreliable service, the passengers knew a two-hour delay for the TAZARA was practically on time.

The railway runs from Tanzania’s largest city through the country’s southern highlands and across the border into Zambia’s copper provinces, finally pulling into the town of Kapiri Mposhi some 1,860 kilometres (1,156 miles) away. It’s a journey that, according to official timetables, should take about 40 hours.

For regular passengers, it’s a cheap way to reach parts of the country that are not located near main highways. For foreign tourists, it’s a unique way to see Tanzania’s landscapes far from the bustling cities and overcrowded safari parks, provided they are not in a hurry. A first-class sleeper car all the way to Mbeya, a travel hub and border town just to the east of Zambia, surrounded by lush mountains and coffee farms, is just over $20.

This year, the railroad celebrated its 50th anniversary, but it has struggled for most of its existence, requiring foreign investment for basic upkeep and failing to haul the amount of freight it was built to carry. Inconsistent maintenance and limited investment have seen its infrastructure and cars deteriorate from decades of use.

It’s hard to determine exactly where a trip on the TAZARA will be at any given time, due to the myriad delays and breakdowns that randomise each journey. Simple derailments from poorly loaded cars and deteriorating tracks are common, and then there’s the occasional unfortunate brush with nature — in August, service was cancelled after a passenger train struck an African buffalo while passing through Tanzania’s Mwalimu Julius Nyerere National Park.

But since the beginning of 2025, the TAZARA has been plagued by more serious incidents — and fatalities — that reveal the desperate need for an overhaul of both ageing infrastructure and poor safety management. In April, two locomotives being moved from Zambia to a workshop in Mbeya for repairs derailed at a bridge in southern Tanzania, killing both drivers.

Two months later, in June, a train derailed in Zambia and was then struck by the “rescue train” dispatched to assist it. The collision killed one TAZARA employee and injured 10 staff and 19 passengers, according to a media release from the railway.

Citing “unexpected operational challenges,” passenger service was briefly suspended in early September. As it turned out, the few operational locomotives the TAZARA could field were stuck in Tanzania, after a fire damaged one of the hundreds of bridges along the track.

But big improvements for TAZARA are on the horizon, thanks to a major investment by the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC), which has pledged $1.4bn to refurbish the ageing rail line over the next three years. Though the continuation of passenger service is mentioned in the agreement, construction work will necessitate some pauses to regular service as the project is completed.

Most of the money will be spent on rehabilitating the tracks, but $400m will go toward 32 new locomotives and 762 wagons, “significantly increasing freight and passenger transport capacity,” according to a TAZARA statement. In return, the Chinese state-owned corporation will receive a 30-year concession to run the TAZARA railway and recoup its investment before turning day-to-day management back over to Tanzanian and Zambian authorities.

A couple waits for the TAZARA to pull out of the main station in Dar es Salaam [Kang-Chun Cheng/Al Jazeera]

A woman sits on the TAZARA in Dar es Salaam [Kang-Chun Cheng/Al Jazeera]

On this Friday in late February, the train eventually arrived at Dar es Salaam’s station, where waiting passengers eagerly boarded. First-class riders, mainly tourists, made their way to their sleeper cabins, followed by second-class sleeper-car passengers, and finally by the crowds of third-class riders, whose seats and benches would be their berths for the coming hours or days of travel.

Inside, the train was sweltering, with no electricity to drive the fans while it was stopped at the station, and windows that wouldn’t stay open. Desperate for a breeze, some passengers jammed empty water bottles into window frames to keep them cracked.

Just before sunset, with little warning, the train’s horn blasted, and the cars lurched with a series of deep metallic clanks. The train crept forward, slowly pulling out of the station and picking up speed. A mere 2.5 hours behind schedule, the TAZARA was under way.

For those on board, the outskirts of Dar es Salaam rolled by as the train made its way West towards the setting sun. Passengers watched as industrial yards gave way to informal settlements of corrugated tin-shack homes, barbershops and local bars. Boys playing football on dusty pitches threw long shadows in the light, the countryside turning from gold to blue as the sun faded.

After decades of service, the TAZARA is showing its age. The rigid seats are ripped and cracked, the paint is chipped and faded, and every surface bears the dents and dings of long years of use, a patina of disregard familiar across developing nations far removed from their post-colonial heydays.

In the 1970s, the Chinese government invested in the TAZARA project — when Western nations wouldn’t — as a symbolic gesture towards former colonial and now-independent nations, hoping to spread goodwill and communist thought through cooperation and development. Now, infrastructure projects are more explicitly tied to financial outcomes. The scramble for copper in Zambia to fuel the development of green technology, electric cars, and more means repairing the TAZARA and increasing its reliability will facilitate the flow of copper ore to Chinese ports and factories.

Throughout its life, the TAZARA has underperformed, moving a fraction of its designed freight capacity of 5 million tonnes of cargo per year — currently, that number is about 500,000 instead. With the planned improvements, Chinese investors hope to quadruple that number to move two million tonnes of cargo annually along the railway.

Passengers alighting at Mlimba in central Tanzania [Kang-Chun Cheng/Al Jazeera]

Many Tanzanians use the train for business as well, though on a much smaller scale. The passenger trains include room for cargo, and cheap goods from Dar es Salaam can be easily sent to towns and villages along the line.

For Jonathan Ngondo, a Tanzanian man in his late thirties, riding the TAZARA is part of his business, he said. Though he makes a decent living as a civil servant in the capital of Dodoma, like many professionals, he has a side hustle, a rice farm, and a warehouse full of last year’s harvest waiting in Kisaki, which sits along the train route.

“I can store my rice in a godown [storage facility] until the prices are better,” he explained. “Then I take the train down to oversee the sales and shipping.”

The TAZARA is an economical way to reach the centre of the country, and more fun than a bus, Jonathan added, before setting off for the bar car.

Across the aisle, Joeli, a man in his early twenties, was leaving Dar es Salaam, having given up looking for work in the city to return to his less-crowded rural hometown, where he and his brother hoped to find employment.

As night fell, a new sound could be heard in the dining car, competing with the clattering of the train: bongo flava music, a Tanzanian favourite. Riders had transformed the space into a party car, with many dancing and singing in the aisles, drinking Safari Lager and sharing bottles of Konyagi, a clear Tanzanian liquor. At the far end of the car, things were more sedate, with older passengers eating stewed chicken and ugali, a local staple made of cornmeal, watching bemused as revellers sang along to their favourite tunes.

In a nearby booth, Ousmane, a young student studying at a university in Dar es Salaam, sipped his tea.

“I’m going to visit my parents near Ifakara,” he said. “The train is the cheapest option.”

Like many of the passengers, Ousmane made the journey regularly, as an alternative to the cross-country buses that ply Tanzania’s highways at breakneck speed.

Finishing his tea, he excused himself back to his cabin, his eyes flitting to the impromptu party happening at the other end of the car. “Drunkards,” he said with a quiet laugh.

A view of Dar es Salaam's suburbs as the TAZARA pulls out of the main station [Kang-Chun Cheng/Al Jazeera]

At about 11pm, the train pulled into Kisaki, a small town south of Mikumi National Park, some 283km (175 miles) west of Dar es Salaam.

Despite the late hour, the platform was alive under the harsh glare of bright lights.

Women in traditional kitenge (vibrant, traditional African cotton fabric) patterns carried basins of drinks on their heads, the cold sodas and juices sweating in the light.

Teenage boys with trays of grilled chicken and plantains ran back and forth, touting their goods, flashlights tied to their heads like makeshift headlamps to illuminate the food on offer.

Customers reached from the train windows, exchanging crumpled shillings for a drink from the comfort of their seats.

Other passengers stepped onto the platform briefly to stretch their legs, whirling through the crowd, buying snacks and breathing the fresh night air.

Back on board, the party in the dining car continued until it was impossible to tell whether passengers’ staggering steps were caused by the swaying of cars or the liquor in their cups.

Some European tourists from the sleeper cars peeked in at the scene, but they quickly decided it was too rowdy and retreated to quieter sections of the train. By 1am, heads were nodding onto tables, and the sound of whirring fans was the only remnant of the revelry.

In economy-class cars, passengers curled into whatever positions they could on their chairs and benches, trying to catch a few hours of sleep.

A stopover in Mlimba, a small town in central Tanzania's plains [Kang-Chun Cheng/Al Jazeera]

When the train pulled into Ifakara, in the Morogoro region of Tanzania, in the small hours of the night, Ngondo roused himself to grab his duffel, bidding farewell to his travel companions and new friends.

With promises to stay in touch and invitations for everyone to visit him in Dodoma, he stepped down and disappeared into the crowd.

So far, after getting under way, the trip had been successful in avoiding major disruptions. After a fitful night on inflexible seats, passengers awoke to a purple dawn glowing behind the dark silhouette of trees in the hills outside Mchombe, also in the Morogoro region.

The train pushed on through thick forest as the day brightened, bringing a kaleidoscope of greens from the foliage. At a long stop at the Mlimba station, the dining car crew served breakfast — tea, steaming beef soup and chapati, a popular flatbread.

The air was thick under the hot sun by mid-morning, and the passengers who hadn’t disembarked overnight moved slowly.

The day’s long journey meant leaving the wide savannahs and woodlands of central Tanzania and climbing into forested mountains, heading across the southern highlands.

Here, the views are incredible, with the narrow-gauge track winding through thick forest and along deep gorges, where rivers run through the rocks below. Constructing the series of 18 tunnels for this relatively short section of the route took crews the better part of a year in the early 1970s, with Chinese and Tanzanian workers pickaxing and blasting their way through the rocky hills.

But the work paid off, and while crossing the Mpanga River, the TAZARA arcs beautifully across a bridge standing on 50-metre-high (160 feet) concrete pillars, delivering the most iconic images of the journey.

A passerby and views of rice paddies in the southern Tanzanian highlands [Kang-Chun Cheng/Al Jazeera]

By late afternoon, the train reached Tanzania’s Southern Highlands, stopping in the town of Makambako, a transportation hub that offers little beyond freight shipping services, cheap guesthouses, and even cheaper bars. At an elevation of 1,550 metres (5,100 feet), the air carried a slight chill, a far cry from the swelter of Dar es Salaam.

Here, hawkers and retailers used different tactics on the platform, and passengers stepping down from their train cars were greeted by piles of used parkas, sweaters and winter coats for sale to those who’d made their way unprepared into what passes for a cold climate this close to the equator. The recycled clothing was another indicator of Western influence — not in new investments towards local industry, but in a casting off of old goods — most likely manufactured for low wages in China or Southeast Asia, bought new in the United States or Europe, and finally discarded and shipped to Africa.

Female vendors sold steaming cups of uji, a sweet millet porridge, and men seared offal on their charcoal grills. Other cooks flipped pans of chipsi mayai, an egg-and-fries omelette popular across Tanzania.

As the train pulled out of town, the view ran downhill and out across the vastness of the Makambako plateau, rolling green scrub with dark thunderheads hanging above, distant mountains a dark smudge on the horizon.

That evening, passengers dozed or read books under the sickly fluorescent light in their cabins. The first night’s excitement had worn away, and the dining car was quiet. When the TAZARA finally pulled into Mbeya, in southwest Tanzania, it was about six hours behind schedule.

The crush of departing passengers pushed for the exits, found taxis, and headed for hotels, guesthouses and homes in the darkened town. They wouldn’t be continuing to the border, instead using the train as a means to travel within Tanzania, and a new crowd of Zambian passengers would be waiting at the station in Nakonde, a border town in northern Zambia, for a train running behind schedule — as usual.

Nakonde station in Zambia at dusk [Kang-Chun Cheng/Al Jazeera]

Sitting at Nakonde’s station, Agnes waited in the fading light for clearance to board, while children ran and played in the dilapidated departure hall. With a baby on her back and a toddler on her lap, the young Zambian mother was accustomed to the delays, keeping the kids entertained while porters loaded cargo onto the train in the gathering dusk.

“I take the train often to visit my parents [in Kapiri Mposhi],” Agnes said. As a single mother in nursing school, she needs to juggle the responsibility of watching her children with studying, hence the trip home for assistance from the grandparents.

Her reasoning was the same as many TAZARA regulars: cheap fares and safety. As in Tanzania, buses in Zambia are widely considered dangerous due to frequent accidents, poor maintenance, overcrowding and reckless driving.

Despite the placards in each car reminding riders of the cooperative effort between China and Zambia, Agnes was only vaguely aware of the railway’s history. For her, Chinese-African relations were rooted in the present-day imbalance she saw between Zambians and Chinese immigrants to her country, where the latter were often supervisors and factory owners, and according to locals, showed little interest in their host nation beyond work and profit.

After the train finally departed Nakonde, the enthusiasm of passengers to be under way was quickly dashed when the TAZARA shuddered to a halt less than an hour outside of town. A steady flow of riders made its way to the rear of the train, hoping to get information about the stoppage or at least a glance at the issue. The throng was stopped by local police who had come on board — they explained that the wheels on the last car had slipped off the track.

Porters hauled sacks of cargo through the aisles and the high grass alongside the train, redistributing goods throughout the other cars to alleviate the load while a fix was made.

Without an estimated repair time and with poor vantage points to watch the work, most passengers retreated to their cabins or seats. Agnes sat with her kids on a lower bunk in a second-class sleeper car, chatting with the other women assigned to her cabin. They had saved money by bringing snacks on board and lounged on the crowded bunks, swapping stories while they waited.

Sometime in the night, the train creaked back into motion, and Agnes and her fellow passengers awoke in the morning to the reassuring rocking of the cars, the Zambian countryside flashing by under the early sun.

In the bright dining car, staff had placed small plastic bouquets on each table, and a handful of riders sat down to eggs and toast, with servings of weak tea fortified by spoonfuls of sugar and powdered milk. Many passengers opted out of the additional few dollars’ worth of food and stuck to cheaper snacks instead.

A Zambian police officer on board the TAZARA [Kang-Chun Cheng/Al Jazeera]

Heading into Zambia’s Machinga province, the train made stops at tiny stations with just a few small buildings falling into disrepair — a far cry from the heady days of the 1970s, when Chinese engineers and local construction crews built the railway linking the two countries.

The further the train travelled into Zambia, the closer it came to what is likely the real goal of China’s latest investment. While official statements from TAZARA and CCECC focus broadly on rehabilitation and efficient service, the railway’s core purpose — linking Zambia’s Copperbelt to Dar es Salaam’s port — makes copper exports the obvious driver. The fate of riders like Jonathan and Agnes, and improved timetables for passenger service, are likely secondary goals to those involved in the refurbishment project.

With each stop, the train cars emptied bit by bit, and even the staff seemed bored, glancing into cabins with hopes of striking up conversations. In the dining car in the late afternoon, David Tembo, a porter in his late twenties, sat drinking a beer with passengers. He’d been working on the railway for three years, making the journey from Kapiri Mposhi to the Zambian border and back twice each week. The job was a good one, Tembo said, and paid for a small house for his family and his children’s school fees. But the cracks were starting to show, and he revealed that pay was often late.

“We haven’t been paid on time in four months,” Tembo said, looking out the window as the hills rolled by. “But what other job am I going to get?”

Despite unreliable wages, he said it was better than manual labour and that he didn’t plan on leaving — plus, the views were nice, he said. David was sanguine about the change to Chinese leadership for the railroad and hoped the takeover would at least lead to him getting paid consistently. From a national pride perspective, it made no difference to him whether an African or a foreign government was in charge.

“When you are a worker, it doesn’t matter who the boss is,” he said.

Even if the United States is losing the infrastructure race in the region, its cultural footprint still looms large: Tembo said he hoped to visit Las Vegas, a dream-like American city he’d watched countless videos about on TikTok, an app created by a Chinese company.

Vendors selling drinks and snacks at the Nakonde station in Zambia, bordering Tanzania [Kang-Chun Cheng/Al Jazeera]

That evening, the train passed through Serenje, a small town about 200km (124 miles) from the end of the line, in the heart of Zambian copper country. Rows of Chinese-owned smelting factories lined the edge of town, turning raw ore into refined copper day and night — or as often as they could, dealing with Zambia’s unreliable electrical grid.

The train kept pushing forward into the darkness, where it would finally creak its way into the station at Kapiri Mposhi, the red and blue livery of the passenger cars a stark contrast to the rows of freight-hauling ones in dull browns and faded blacks that dwarfed the Mukuba Express.

These are the railcars that transport the critical resources that make the whole system worth investment: copper that keeps the trains running. For the passengers early this year, the railyard marked the end of a tiring journey — but for the future of the TAZARA, it isn’t the end of the line.

In late November, representatives from China, Tanzania and Zambia met in Lusaka to inaugurate the agreed-upon project, and promised a prosperous future for all involved. The revitalisation has started at Kapiri Mposhi, with an announcement of “boots on the ground” on TAZARA social media accounts, with pictures of a Zambian work crew lowering a new section of rail into place.

Though the investment from China means ceding control of the TAZARA for three decades, Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema highlighted the potential upside of a new economic corridor, and focused on the people who have lived along the nearly 2,000km of railroad for generations.

“This is your asset,” he told them. “Look after it from Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia all the way up to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.”

Reporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

The TAZARA snaking through the southern Tanzania highlands [Kang-Chun Cheng/Al Jazeera]

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The TAZARA turns 50: Riding the railway that bridges Tanzania and Zambia