About two years since actual operations started on the standard gauge railway (SGR) line between Mombasa and Nairobi, it is time to take stock of the phenomenal success the service has registered.

The biggest indicator of this is the fact that in the past three months, the SGR trains have attained the initial break-even projections, bringing in 258 freight trains by transiting 23,522 container tonnes.

This success has been evident in the passenger and freight components, the latter service having started only in January last year.

The tonnage lifted during the last quarter from Mombasa to Nairobi increased to 1,059,215 metric tonnes from the corresponding quarter’s tonnage of 1,024,220 in 2018.

Today, the SGR line operates an average of eight cargo trains daily, but this is elastic and sometimes goes to as high as 14, depending on the cargo arriving at the port.

Conventional and containerised cargo topped the uptake charts and the line achieved its objective of supporting the nascent industrial and agro-processing sectors.

Source: Daily Nation

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