TAZARA revival breaks ground on Dar es Salaam control centre

Days after marking the Tanzania-Zambia Railway's 50th anniversary, officials broke ground in Dar es Salaam on a new training centre and operations control centre, the first visible construction work under the railway's $1.4 billion revitalisation project. The training facility will cover 21,800 square metres, with 9,641 square metres of floor space, while the operations control centre is intended as the central command hub for the 1,860-kilometre line linking Zambia's copperbelt to the Tanzanian coast.

The ceremony was attended by Tazara managing director Bruno Ching'andu, Tanzania's transport permanent secretary Godius Kahyarara and China's ambassador to Tanzania, Chen Mingjian. China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC), which holds a 30-year concession to rehabilitate and operate the line under a public-private partnership signed in September 2025, is the main contractor.

From ceremony to construction

"The success of this project will ultimately be measured by improvements in railway performance, including safer operations," Kahyarara said at the event, a reminder that the railway's most immediate problems are operational rather than symbolic: ageing locomotives, worn track and a freight volume that has fallen to a fraction of the line's original design capacity.

The broader revitalisation plan, backed by Chinese financing and equity from copper producers CMOC and Zijin Mining, aims to lift TAZARA's freight capacity from around 100,000 tonnes a year to 2.4 million tonnes, largely by replacing worn track, rebuilding stations and procuring new locomotives and wagons. The training centre is meant to build a skilled workforce for the modernised railway ahead of that equipment arriving.

A long-awaited fix

Built by China in the 1970s to give landlocked Zambia an export route independent of white-minority-ruled Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, TAZARA has for decades underperformed against its original potential, starved of maintenance investment and squeezed by competition from road transport. Its revival is now bound up with the broader contest between Chinese- and Western-backed corridors for Central Africa's copper and cobalt exports, with TAZARA positioned as an eastern alternative to the Lobito Corridor running through Angola. For Zambian copperbelt miners, the test will be whether construction milestones like this one translate into trains running on time within the stated three-year build-out.

Sources

• The Citizen (Tanzania): Work gathers pace in Tazara's $1.4billion revitalisation plan, 20 Jul 2026

Photo: A bridge on the TAZARA railway line linking Zambia and Tanzania. Richard Stupart, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.