Camel trains are holding up Ethiopia’s new railway line

“MORE than any other technical design or social institution,” wrote the late British historian, Tony Judt, “the railway stands for modernity.” But the road to modernity can be a bumpy one. So it was at the opening of the world’s first steam passenger railway in 1830, when a dignitary in Liverpool was crushed by a train. So too in Saudi Arabia today, where construction of a high-speed railway was almost derailed by advancing sand dunes. And also in Ethiopia, where Africa’s newest major railroad has been frustrated by one of civilisation’s earliest forms of transport, the camel.

Since the start of commercial operations last month, at least 50 animals have been killed crossing the new Chinese-built line connecting Addis Ababa, the capital of landlocked Ethiopia, with the port of neighbouring Djibouti. Of these, 15 were camels flattened in a single collision, according to Tilahun Farka, the head of the jointly state-owned Ethio-Djibouti Railways, which manages the locomotives.