I can't see it being a white elephant. Africa has huge natural resources and I can see it being the next emerging powerhouse of manufacturing, following the BRIC.

Neil

Probably as commercially viable as Crossrail. If Crossrail was viable it wouldn't have required £14 billion of subsidy to build it, they could have borrowed the money and paid it back out of revenue. After all we in the North West have to borrow at commercial rates and then pay tolls to build our infrastructure (new Mersey crossing). This is expected to cost £600 million, only 4% of what Crossrail is costing. It wouldn't be as bad if they weren't imposing tolls on the old bridge, which was paid for by the taxpayer over 55 years ago. Perhaps I should expect tolls to be imposed on London Bridge, Vauxhall Bridge etc. but I'm not holding my breath. As it is my son will have to find nearly £1000 per year just to get to work, and wages up here are significantly lower than in the South East

Don't feel hard done by, the Liverpool Mersey tunnels, opened in 1934 and 1971

were meant to become free once the cost of construction was covered however they both remain tolled.

as far as I can find the Dartford Tunnel/Bridge has always had a toll, whereas the existing Runcorn/Widnes bridge has been free since it was built at taxpayer expense. I feel as tho' I'm being charged to travel across my own bridge

I think I saw the old line described (when it was built) as the Lunatic Railway.

Ian S C

As far as I know We over here are paying a phone tax started around WW1.

Short story: Its a Chinese long term plan to access mineral deposits.

Long story:

The Chinese already have experience of this when they built the Tazara railway between Zambia and Dar-es-Salaam (place of my birth), in Tanzania. Regardless of what we read in the West, that railway still runs regularly when the Chinese want to move their raw metals/minerals cargo from Zambia to Dar-es-Salaam port.

On Ady1's link, you will see that the plan (see the map too) is to connect the railway all the way to Kisangani in D.R.Congo (Zaire). The only real employer in Kisangani was SOTEXKI – textile printing operation, run mainly by a French Belgiuan Italian consortium. The only other thing there is an airport with a small township. The lands around there are seriously rich in certain mineral deposits… one of which is Coltan. Lets just say that there are serious Western International institutions who have direct and indirect interest in this region, involved in securing their interests by what ever means necessary. Now the Chinese want a piece or whole of this action.

For about a decade in the 1990s I was involved in supplying raw material – colour, fabric, machinery parts, as well as a technical engineer to SOTEXKI. The logistics of getting goods to the factory involved land road, from Matadi (Western Port of Zaire) to Kinshasa, and river barges from Kinshasa – loading at the Unilever factory, to Kisangani, up the river Congo – all protected with armed guards. Things good tricky in the rainy season.

Transporting from the East presented a different challenge. Preferred route By road from Dar-es-Salaam to Goma (Rwanda), cross and then by road to Kisangani. Again, very dangerous journey, complete with armed guards on board, and extremely expensive. Convoy of five to six 40'ft Containers. When it rained, you just couldn't move the goods by road. So load the the containers back on a vessel and off-load at Mombassa. Then move the goods by road from Mombassa to Goma (Rwanda), via Kampala. Again, complete with armed guards – very expensive. Once at Goma, cross into Congo, and move cargo by road to Kisangani. Alternatively, if urgent, bring cargo into Entebbe, and fly it into Kisangani.

Then came the Rwandan genocide, sleepless nights over a month wondering where the goods were in transit from Mombassa. Last radio call came in when the convoy just passed through Kampala. Belgian insurers were informed (yes you can get high risk insurance as a price). The goods got to the factory in the end – which is a different and difficult story, but the process troubled me. Soon there after flowed in the international interests which financed various interventions over the border using Ugandan army, etc., laying new roads through the jungle from Kisangani, into Uganda, aiding development of mining legal?, and moving coltan – for example by road to Mombassa to places in Europe for refinement and re-export to people involved in manufacture of components in the mobile phone industry… 'All clean business!'.

As Clive says, with it, AIDS came into Kisangani, along with various armies and war lords and their interests which fled from Rwanda. The printing factory lost a lot of workers to AIDS, or shot dead, or to the mines where money and work was easy. The Ugandan army robbed the Lebanese diamond dealers at gun point, and many bad things took over.

The factory still survives, even though I stopped working with them after the situation in the region got trickier.

The governments in the region don't give a dam about the people. It is all about the money which can be realised quickly, provided all the warring fractions can be 'helped to unite' by the Chinese by whatever means necessary.

Ketan at ARC.

The domestic local manufacturing industry won't be helped much by the railway if its reason for being is to ship raw material to foreign manufacturers. Sounds like a faster way to drain the country of natural wealth while giving the least possible money to the locals

Exactly. China's investment in infrastructure in Kenya over the past decade has been vast, and it is solely self interest to get minerals out of the country, and into China.

China is just doing what Briain did 200 years ago, it needed resources so it went and got them regardless of who they upset in the proscess.

Ian S C