Benguela Railway

The Benguela Railway is one of Africa's great engineering stories, and Lobito's station — the western terminus — is where it begins. The line was conceived by Scottish financier Sir Robert Williams in the 1890s as a way to bring the copper of the Katanga (now in the DRC) to the Atlantic. Construction started in 1903 from Lobito and proceeded eastward through some extremely difficult terrain, reaching the Congo border by 1929.

The station building itself, while modest, has a quiet dignity appropriate to its history. The surrounding rail yard still shows the bones of a major freight operation. At its busiest, the Benguela Railway was shipping over 300,000 tonnes of copper a year through Lobito.

A Chinese-funded restoration has rebuilt much of the main line and freight traffic has resumed. Talk to locals about any passenger excursions — there has been occasional interest in running heritage or tourist trains on portions of the rebuilt track, which would be a spectacular journey into the Angolan interior.

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A story
At its peak, the Benguela Railway ran 1,344 km from Lobito all the way to the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, making it one of the longest railways in Africa. The line carried the copper that fuelled much of the world's electrical industry in the mid-twentieth century. Angola's civil war (1975–2002) destroyed much of the infrastructure — bridges were blown up, rolling stock was stripped — but a Chinese-funded restoration has brought parts of the line back into operation, and the dream of a trans-African corridor lives on.