With Sh300bn: would you build a road or a railway?

 By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

05 July 2015 

Several readers have asked whether it would have been cheaper to expand the Mombasa highway instead of building a new railway line. Now I am neither a civil engineer nor a quantity surveyor, so what I will do here is just apply simple common sense to make a good rough estimate. Let’s find out…

The standard gauge railway is going to cost about Sh330billion. Some analysts have argued that this amount is too high but I don’t want to go down that route. I will only compare the contract sum with that of building a dual carriage highway.

Thankfully, we recently completed a modern highway – the Thika Superhighway. That one cost us some Sh36bn and it is 40km long. The distance from Nairobi to Mombasa if about 500km. This is12.5 time that to Thika, therefore, if we were to build something similar on that stretch, it would probably cost us about 12.5 times the amount we spent on Thika road. That is, Sh450bn!

This is over 36 per cent higher than the money going into the new railway line. But of course, building a 500km superhighway would be going a little over-board. We certainly wouldn’t need the service lanes along the entire length – may be just on the first and last 50km. That is 100km of a superhighway and 400km of a “normal” dual-carriageway.

The 400km of normal dual road will probably cost about the same as a 200km superhighway. So, in total we are looking at approximately the price of a 300km-superhighway (50km +50km + 200km).

300km is 7.5 times the length of Thika road; so the cost will come to about Sh270bn. This is now 22 per cent lower than the cost of the railway but it is still in the league of a few hundred billion. I wouldn’t be surprised if expanding the road also cost Sh330bn!

So I think the question boils down to this: if you have Sh330 billion to improve transport infrastructure between Nairobi and Mombasa, would you use on the road or on the railway? Think about that…

Meanwhile; last week we saw that approximately 400 containers are injected into the road every hour. If we want to take at least half of these by rail, we need the train to take a minimum of 200 each hour. Is that viable?

The longest trains in the world are to be found in Canada with lengths exceeding four kilometers pulling over 300 wagons. Each wagon can take up to 4 cargo containers, so, in total, such a train can haul about 1,200 containers at a go!

We are not about to break the record, but it turns out that we can easily carry the 200 containers in one train – 50 wagons stretching to about 750m. The question is whether we have the operational efficiency to do that every hour. We know the port can load them, but will Kenya Railways Corporation be able to evacuate them?