Is this the last call for the Lunatic Express?

The East African railway was meant to shore up Britain's hold on Uganda. Photo / Supplied

In a neglected corner beyond Nairobi's frantic bus terminal lies the entrance to the city's railway station. It barely warrants a second glance from the thousands of commuters making their way on to the hundreds of matatu minibuses that keep Kenya's capital moving.

The station is more useful for time-travelling than getting anywhere in a hurry. Most of the destinations have fallen off its battered departure boards, no one sits on the ripped upholstery in the first-class waiting room, and only a tiny Somali girl is brave enough to use the blocked bathrooms behind.

Platform One has the feel of a museum gone to seed, which is what it has taken a step closer to becoming this month with the unveiling of plans for a high-speed rail link between Mombasa and the capital.

It may not have passed the lips of Nairobi's station announcers, but the plan for double-decker trains was also the last call for the legendary "Lunatic Express", a folly of Victorian engineering that changed East Africa and created the modern country now crowding on to buses outside.

The new version is expected to cost more than £2.5 billion ($5.4 billion), take five years to build and cut journey times to three hours. Despite its price and ambition, the construction will not match the extraordinary cost in human lives and to the British Exchequer of the line it replaces.

What is left of the railway today is more curiosity than controversy. The sleeper to Mombasa offers faded grandeur and comforting adventure to the white tourists in first class while giving the cheapest possible route to the coast to those sleeping on benches in third.

Dinner is announced soon after departure by the tuneless chimes of a worn xylophone. What remains of the romance of rail is on display in the dining car, where threadbare tablecloths and mismatched cutlery bear testament to doing your best with what's available. The distinctive "RVR" logo of Rift Valley Railways breaks the frayed burgundy band around the dinner service.

A few wrinkled noses and forced smiles mark the train's passage through Nairobi's slum district as the smell of open sewers wafts through patched-up mosquito screens on the open windows. There are no electric lights to illuminate the faces outside as they watch the express idle past.

Mutual incomprehension also marked the colonial engineers' push into Africa's fabled interior, which was seen as the domain of naked savages, deadly diseases and ferocious animals. It is hard now to imagine how the first locomotives must have appeared to the patchwork of peoples who found themselves in the way of British progress in what was then the East African Protectorate.

Many tribes had ancient prophecies of an "iron snake" that would bring with it a "white tribe" who would steal their cattle and end their world as they had known it.

It was the Nandi, whose lands stretched from the western side of the Mau escarpment, who put up the sternest resistance, terrorising the survey party and stripping the line of steel and copper for weapons and ornaments. Sir Charles Eliot, commissioner of the protectorate, wrote in 1905: "One can imagine what thefts would be recorded on a European railway if the telegraph wires were pearl necklaces and the rails first-rate sporting guns." Now, as then, the line is threatened by scrap-metal opportunists who have responded to the economic crisis by stripping Kenya's railway bridges.

Sadly, it is still dark when the Mombasa-bound service passes over the bridge that would guarantee the lunatic line became a legend. Bridging the River Tsavo was meant to take less than two months. Instead, it took almost a year as workers drafted in from India fell prey to lions.

The big cats first struck when one dragged a British engineer from his tent, crushing his head in its jaws. Immortality was achieved by Charles H. Ryall, a police superintendent who fell asleep in his guard carriage and was dragged through the window by a lion. Within months there was a bounty of £100 on the "man-eaters of Tsavo" and the camp was swarming with soldiers, opportunists and wealthy hunters.

All to no avail. The "deadly monsters" took on supernatural status to many at Tsavo as the pair, a male and female, evaded barricades and guard posts to kill at least 28 workers. Their exploits were commemorated in the 1996 film Ghosts and the Darkness. Eventually, after endless nights watching from a tree, Colonel John H. Patterson shot the first of them dead in December 1898. It was so heavy it took eight men to carry its carcass. Its mate was killed three weeks later and the bridge was completed.

Many more workers were killed by malaria, while the beasts of burden suffered from tsetse flies that killed 1500 of the 1800 animals used.

As the express train pulls gently in to the port city where the line was born, the clock reads 9.28am and the journey has taken 14 hours. The driver is quietly pleased that we are 32 minutes ahead of schedule. Yes, he admits, it does take six hours by bus but "who would want to drive on those reckless roads?"

As for the future, he is not too worried. The 21st-century train isn't going to arrive any quicker in Kenya than its late 19th-century counterpart, he believes.

The original purpose of East African Railway was to shore up Britain's hold on Uganda, which was believed to hold the key to the security of the River Nile.

In the convoluted logic of the late 19th-century "Scramble for Africa", stopping France, Germany or Belgium from tampering with Lake Victoria's waters flowing into the Nile would secure the Suez Canal and, in turn, the passage to India.

The railway heralded the birth of modern-day Kenya and Uganda. Stretching 1057km from the humid coastal port of Mombasa, climbing through the desert of eastern Kenya, dipping into the Rift Valley, heading towards Lake Victoria, then turning towards Uganda's capital, Kampala, the railway enabled Britain to impose imperial rule across east Africa.

A rail track would mean troops could be quickly moved to the Great Lakes region. At least, this was the argument made in the 1890s by the British East Africa Company to persuade Parliament to finance the line that would cost £5 million.

Assurances were also given that it would hasten the end of slavery.

Not everyone was convinced. Radical MP Henry Labouchere denounced it memorably: "Where it is going, nobody knows, what is the use of it, none can conjecture ... It is clearly naught but a lunatic line."

- INDEPENDENT