Tazara Railway

The TAZARA Railway (Tanzania–Zambia Railway) is a railway line linking the port of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania, with Kapiri Mposhi, in Zambia, covering about 1 860 km. It was built in the 1970s with financing and technical support from China, offering landlocked Zambia and the wider central African copperbelt an alternative route to the sea that bypassed white-minority-ruled southern Africa at the time. The line is jointly owned by the Tanzanian and Zambian governments through the Tazara Authority. It carries copper, other minerals, agricultural produce and general cargo between the Zambian copperbelt, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Indian Ocean coast. Decades of underinvestment, ageing locomotives and rolling stock, and competition from road transport have reduced its capacity and reliability. The railway features in regional plans to rehabilitate and modernise rail corridors to support copper and cobalt exports from the copperbelt region. China has periodically been approached for further financing to upgrade the line, reflecting its continued strategic interest in the route. The railway is often discussed alongside other regional transport corridors, such as the Benguela Railway and the Lobito Corridor, as competing or complementary routes to the sea for central African mineral exports. Its history symbolises a significant episode of African-Chinese infrastructure cooperation predating more recent Belt and Road initiatives.