Luanda Railway
railway line in Angola
The Luanda Railway (sometimes called Angola Railway) is a 424 km (263 mi) single-track Cape gauge railway line from the Angolan capital of Luanda to Malanje. A branch line departs the railway at Zenza do Itombe for Dondo. The line is operated by the state owned company Caminho de Ferro de Luanda E.P., short CFL EP.
History
From its terminal at the Atlantic port of Luanda, the railway heads inland towards Eastern Angola, but ends in the middle of the country at Malanje. A branch line departed the railway at Zenza do Itombe for Dondo.
The coastal segment from Luanda to Lucala was built by a Portuguese company in 1889. The line was then extended to Malanje in 1909 by the Portuguese government. After independence from Portugal in 1975, the Angolan civil war broke out. In 2001, the Luanda Railway was one of the only functioning railways in Angola, when it was hit by a bomb attack, killing 91 people. The prolonged fighting lasted until 2002 and destroyed most of the railway infrastructure in Angola.
In 2005, a $355 million rehabilitation project was begun by the China Railway 20 Bureau Group, with funding from the China International Fund.
The public source identifies “Luanda Railway” as railway line in Angola. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Luanda, Railway and railway.
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This entry incorporates text from “Luanda Railway” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.