The Railway
The line from the south reached Bulawayo in October 1897 and was formally opened on 4 November 1897; Bulawayo became the hub and headquarters of the country's railways.
Bulawayo was a railway town before it was anything else. The line from the Cape reached it in 1897, three years after the town was laid out. For most of the next century the city was the junction of the country’s railways and the headquarters of the company that ran them. Countless Bulawayo families had someone “on the railways.” The steam depot, the workshops and the station were part of the city’s daily life.
“Advance Rhodesia”: November 1897
The first construction train reached Bulawayo on the afternoon of Tuesday 22 October 1897. According to the Bulawayo Chronicle, “over a hundred people” were there to watch it stop at a temporary siding about half a mile short of the station site.
The official opening came a fortnight later, on Thursday 4 November 1897. The date was chosen to fall on the anniversary of the day in 1893 when the colonial columns entered the burned ruins of Lobengula’s capital. Special trains brought visitors from Port Elizabeth, East London and Kimberley. The engine bore the words “Advance Rhodesia” and was hung with bunting. The High Commissioner, Sir Alfred Milner, presented a Victoria Cross, and a banquet at the Palace Hotel ran until midnight. The Chronicle’s editorial that morning declared: “Today is the parting of the ways for Matabeleland.”
It was a settler celebration, held on a date chosen to mark the defeat of the Ndebele kingdom. The railway that made Bulawayo a city also strengthened the colonial hold on the country.
A railway city
From Bulawayo, lines went on to Salisbury and the coast at Beira by 1900. They reached Victoria Falls, across the Zambezi and north towards the Copperbelt soon after, and much later, in 1999, ran direct to Beitbridge. Bulawayo became the headquarters of Rhodesia Railways and later of National Railways of Zimbabwe, whose headquarters building in the city centre dates from 1985. The Railway Museum opened in 1972.
Railway work shaped the city’s people and its politics. The African railway workers’ strike of October 1945, in which Bulawayo’s railwaymen were central, is often counted among the founding events of the country’s labour movement. We have not yet told that story properly here, and we would like to.
What the photographs show
The photographs in this set are mainly steam. Garratt locomotives were a feature of Rhodesian and Zimbabwean railways long after steam had gone elsewhere. The set includes a Class 14A Garratt leaving Mpopoma for Cement, another near Barbourfields, a Class 16A Garratt near Ntabazinduna Siding, sunrise at Figtree Siding, and a line-up of Garratts and reflections in the Bulawayo Steam Depot. They were supplied by a rail-enthusiast website, “Geoff’s Trains.” The city-centre photographs add the station and the NRZ building.
What we don’t know yet
- Who “Geoff” is, and whether he is happy for us to keep these photographs with his name on them.
- Railway families. If your father, mother or grandparents worked on the railways, at the workshops, the depot, the offices or on the line, we would like to hear their story. Photographs of railway housing, staff sports days and the railway clubs would be especially welcome.
- 1945. If anyone in your family remembers the strike, or has papers from it, please get in touch.
Sources
- Zimbabwe Field Guide, “The Railway comes to Bulawayo – the town’s festivities in November 1897”, drawing on Bulawayo Chronicle reports of October–November 1897.
- Wikipedia, “Timeline of Bulawayo”: later line openings, Railway Museum (1972), NRZ headquarters (1985).
8 photographs of The Railway →
Do you know more about this? Corrections, photographs and your own account are all welcome, and a correction is published on the page with the date it was made. Send something in.