CONCRETE | RAIL | SLEEPERS

KAMPALA - The Ministry of Works and Transport has resorted to the use concrete sleepers over steel ones in the restoration of the railway to curb vandalism.

Gen. Edward Katumba Wamala, the Minister of Works and Transport has informed the MPs on Committee on Government Assurance and Implementation that in the case of Mukono-Namanve-Kampala railway line, the Uganda Railways Corporation had resorted to using concrete railway sleepers to replace the metallic ones that have been vandalized.

“The sleepers on that section are going to be concrete as opposed to steel sleepers because that section has been highly prone to vandalism. It is proved that concrete sleepers have no market,” he said.

While inspecting the works last month, Katumba appealed to Ugandans not to tamper with the railway line.

Katumba said the UPDF has been deployed on the line to protect the national asset from vandalism.

He also appealed to Steel rolling mills not to purchase railways parts. “I appeal to Steel Rolling Mills not to purchase anything marked Railways Uganda,” he said.

The rehabilitation of the 234km railways line from Tororo to Namanve kicked off in January 2022 with the main purpose to increase the transportation of bulky cargo turnage by brail to at least 60,000 tons/month.

During the Committee meeting, Katumba told the committee that the best way to save the road network was to move 90 percent of the cargo onto rail and water. He also said that the Kampala-Malaba line will be completed by October 2022 and that plans were in high gear to procure two more vessels to aid water transport.

He said when government reclaimed the railway from Rift Valley Railways (RVR) in 2018 after the concession had ended, the equipment and property were in a sorry state.

“We practically received a shell of an entity because most of the infrastructure; you talk of the railway line, locomotives and wagons were all gone. In the process, some lines have been vandalised because of lack of attention to them, for example, for the Kampala Kasese line, there is no railway line,” he said according to a statement from Parliament.

For Busoga and Kasese lines, the minister said the routes were vandalised with nothing to start from and that also 90 percent of the land had been encroached on.

For the Tororo-Gulu line, he said that the community along the line respected the railway line including the reserve and that to their astonishment, even the materials that had been removed and stored at the station warehouses for years were still intact.