Private consortium | |
Industry | Transportation |
Founded | 2005 |
Headquarters | Nairobi, Kenya |
Key people
|
Titus Naikuni Chairman Carlos Andrade Group CEO Bong Yoon Chief Financial Officer |
Services | Railway systems |
Revenue | $84.2 million (FY 2014) |
$11.3 million (FY 2014) | |
Number of employees
|
2100 (2014) |
Website | Homepage |
Rift Valley Railways (RVR) is a consortium that was established to manage the parastatal railways of Kenya and Uganda. The consortium won the bid for private management of the century-old Uganda Railway in 2005. The Kenya-Uganda railway had been run by the East African Railways and Harbours Corporation 1948 - 1977. In 2014, RVR moved 1,334 million net tonne kilometers of rail freight, up from 1,185 million net tonne kilometers the previous year.
The railway line, derided as the "Lunatic Line" by a critical British press during its construction and still referred to colloquially as the "Lunatic Express", runs about 900 kilometres (560 mi) from Kenya's Indian Ocean port of Mombasa, through Nairobi, and up the Rift Valley to Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria.
Another leg of the same railway system traverses the Great Rift Valley, through the town of Eldoret in Kenya, entering Uganda at Malaba and passing through Tororo and Jinja to enter Kampala, Uganda's capital. From there, the railway continues to Kasese in the Western Region of Uganda close to the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, approximately 1,600 kilometres (990 mi) north-west of Mombasa. At Tororo, the northern leg of the Ugandan railway system branches off and travels north-westwards through Mbale, Soroti, and Lira to the city of Gulu, the largest metropolitan area in the Northern Region of Uganda. From Gulu, the line continues west to end in Pakwach on the banks of the Albert Nile, approximately 1,500 kilometres (930 mi) north-west of Mombasa.