At half-past three an ancient sigh filled the station. It was a hot, humid, sun-flushed afternoon in Dar es Salaam, the sprawling Tanzanian port city, and there was a scene of near crisis as the train pulled in. Women trundled by with coolers and baskets and pots and wooden spoons, as if they were on their way to a church picnic; there was an endless procession of duffel bags and suitcases and nylon sacks, a rush of porters heaving bags on to their shoulders, parting families in hysterical states of farewell. Heads and hands poked from the windows, gulping the air, grabbing at loaves of bread being sold from the platform. The scene inside was like a tenement, bodies on top of bodies, music and laughter and radio broadcasts in the tropics.
We wedged ourselves into small stuffy cabins and opened the windows. The police arrived to clear the platform. With a loud groan we lurched from the station, loaves of bread still being flung towards the windows. Soon we were chugging through the city's ragged outskirts, pillars of diesel smoke barrelling from the engine, the sun blotted out by our industrial-age progress into the raw heart of Tanzania.
For travellers with time to kill and a penchant for confined spaces, the Central Line's weekly cross-country passage is one of Africa's great rail journeys. Taking in some 600 miles of East African bush at its own unhurried pace, the train's ponderous slog to Kigoma – a scruffy, German-built port on the shores of Lake Tanganyika – is a gentle rebuke to the harried world of the modern-day safari. No pre-dawn wake-up calls, no eagle-eyed pensioners keen on spotting the Big Five before brunch. In a vast country where twin-prop planes can whisk you to your remote safari camp in under an hour, the two- or three-day train trip is a safari – a "journey" – in the true Swahili sense of the word.
For the architects of the great colonial enterprise of the 19th century, the case for the railway was far more prosaic. Most of the African interior was waiting to be opened up for European commerce. The construction of a railway would link the great inland lakes – Nyasa (Malawi), Tanganyika and Victoria Nyanza – as well as the plantations of the interior, growing sisal, tea, coffee and cotton, with the ports of the East African coast, where crops could be exported to foreign markets.
Today the Central Line is no less important a lifeline for much of Tanzania. Countless lives in countless villages rely on the train's passage. Last year, when flooding washed out large portions of the track, the venerable train was put out of commission. It took six months for railway workers to get the Central Line back on track – six months of struggling and fretting for many Tanzanians.
During my trip there were no such worries. In the villages we passed, the train was a cause for celebration. Mothers held infants up as if in offering. Men waved their hats. Farmers and elders wobbling along on their bicycles stopped and looked up and smiled thinly, squinting at our dust. Aboard the train, heads poked from the windows in twos and threes, enjoying the easy camaraderie of a long journey that's just begun.
My cabinmate was Godfrey Chatta, an avuncular, moon-faced septuagenarian with large, mild eyes and a complexion like butterscotch. A former employee of the Tanzanian Railways Corporation, he had done the end-to-end journey from Dar es Salaam to his home in Kigoma more times than he could remember.
"Railway employees would always ride for free," he said of the time when the rail was state owned. "But when the Indians took over, they said: 'No, no. You didn't work for us.'" Now Godfrey, shrugging with resignation, had to pay like the rest of us.
During the night, stopped in a dimly lit station serenaded by the eager cries of villagers, I would wake to the sight of Godfrey engaged in some brisk commerce, passing out a few rumpled bills and lifting some heavy plastic bags inside. In the morning oranges and coconuts spilled from beneath the bed.
Commerce has always played a central role on this east-west axis. When the Germans began laying tracks in 1905, construction followed along the centuries-old caravan route cleared by Arab traders. More than a century later, business is still brisk along the route to Lake Tanganyika. In small market towns we were surrounded by women hugging great bags of cassava or balancing bundles of sugar cane on their heads. Across the arid central plateau, where soil conditions are poor and agriculture scarce, villagers approached the train wagging brooms and walking sticks, woven-palm baskets, viscous honey trapped inside old water bottles like prehistoric amber.
If our arrival sparked a festive chaos in the stations we passed, the carnival atmosphere aboard the train was no less lively. Men laughed and bickered in the hallways, in the cabins, doors flung open to relieve the choking dust and heat, women sat on the floor and on foldaway beds braiding each other's hair. In the dining car, men with bloodshot eyes sat at the tables nursing tall, lukewarm bottles of Safari beer. At any hour of the day I would have to fight my way through the crowd to find a place to sit. Dinner was a plate of rice and fried fish accompanied by a small bowl of watery sauce. Some men slumped in their seats, the tables before them littered with bits of rice and bottle caps. The din would carry on deep into the night.
The sounds of tippling Tanzanians, though, weren't my biggest problem as I tried to sleep. My skin stuck to the narrow foldaway bed – it was like trying to sleep on a hospital gurney. Bugs skittered along the wall, pit-pattering past my head. I tried to shut them out, to close my eyes and find some inner peace as we barrelled through the darkness. It was no use. I would only snatch a few minutes of shuteye before being jerked back to a restless half-sleep. The cabin was stuffy but Godfrey insisted we keep the windows shut. Thieves were known to clamber aboard in the night, he said.
For most of the travellers I spoke to, the trip aboard the Central Line was not one of leisure but of economic necessity. Many were market women who made the long trip to and from Dar es Salaam to buy cheap Chinese-made goods on the coast – the slightest profit margin justifying the 1,200-mile round-trip journey. Others were returning to visit their homes buried deep in the interior, bringing with them the savings they had earned through jobs in Dar – as day labourers, porters, night watchmen – to help shore up a family's finances in Kigoma, or Tabora, or Uvinza. This feeling of sparseness, of scarcity, was reinforced by the dusty landscape we travelled through. In village after village of mud-walled, thatched-roof huts, it was easy to imagine the inhabitants planning their days and weeks with the same grim thrift and wariness.
By the end of our second day together, Godfrey and I had fallen into the train's easy rhythm, sharing stories over biscuits and Godfrey's bottomless Thermos of English Breakfast Tea. Outside, the endless, flat monotony of central Tanzania rolled by. The rains had failed again and it would be months before much of Tanzania returned to its lush fullness. Yet it was a marvellous trip that carried me, for two dusty days and nights, through countless villages that would have appeared, if at all, as tiny, fast-moving specks from the window of an airplane.
It was cool and misty as we woke on our final morning. A blood-red sun rose over the silhouettes of distant hills. We had come through the vast dust bowl of central Tanzania and passed into the rich, fertile lands of the west. Here the soil was red and the trees were heavy with fruit. The women approaching the train at each station came bearing sugar cane, bananas, lettuce and tomatoes the colour of gemstones. In Kazuramimba Godfrey bought a bag of sweet potatoes, clearing a few square inches of floor space with his bare foot.
At the station in Kigoma, families had gathered on the platform, welcoming home husbands and mothers, nephews and prodigal sons. I heaved my pack on to my shoulders and wedged myself into the hall. My words with Godfrey were brief and warm in parting, and we exchanged our hopes that we might cross paths that week in Kigoma. Outside I watched him passing bags and bundles out the window, directing the movement of the porters like a field marshal.
Essentials
The Central Line leaves Dar es Salaam for Kigoma once a week. A first-class ticket (around £27) secures you a bed in a two-person cabin. The train is administered by the Tanzanian Railways Corporation (00 255 22 211 7833), though bookings are best done at the station in Dar. Try to book at least a week in advance.
