Lunatic Express
| Government-owned corporation | |
| Successor | |
| Founded | 1896 |
| Defunct | 1929 |
The Uganda Railway, colloquially known as the Lunatic Express or the Lunatic Line, is a railway system and former railway company dating to the colonial period. The line links the interiors of Uganda and Kenya with the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa in Kenya. After a series of mergers and splits, the line is now in the hands of the Kenya Railways Corporation and the Uganda Railways Corporation.
Built during the Scramble for Africa, the Uganda Railway was the one genuinely strategic railway to be constructed in tropical Africa at that time. Before the railway's construction, the British East Africa Company had begun the Mackinnon-Sclater road, a 600 miles (970 km) ox-cart track from Mombasa to Busia in Kenya, in 1890. With steam-powered access to Uganda, the British could transport people and soldiers to ensure their domination of the African Great Lakes region.
The Uganda Railway was named after its ultimate destination, for its entire original 660-mile length actually lay in what would become Kenya. Construction began at the port city of Mombasa in British East Africa in 1896 and finished at the line's terminus, Kisumu, on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria, in 1901.
Construction was carried out principally by labourers from British India, 32,000 of whom were brought in because of a lack of indigenous labour in sparsely-populated Kenya. 2,498 workers died during the construction of the railway. While most of the surviving Indians returned home, 6,724 decided to remain after the line's completion, creating a community of Indian East Africans.
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