Phase Two of Standard Gauge Railway to cost Ksh 63B

The cost of building underground tunnels, in the second phase of the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) from Nairobi to Malaba, has been estimated to be Ksh 63 billion.

This figure is a sixth of the cost incurred in the construction of the railway between Mombasa and Nairobi.

The Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure says the tunnels will be expensive owing to the distance and work involved.

The tunnels between Nairobi and Naivasha will cover 23 per cent of the total distance and are estimated to cost 18.2 billion shillings.

Transport Cabinet Secretary James Macharia says the section will have more than 20 tunnels cutting through the Rift Valley escarpments and this will make the design work more expensive because it will have to achieve a certain gradient to connect to the next section.

However, the CS did not give the full details of the whole cost of the project saying that this will be presented to the Cabinet in the next one week for approval before it is made public.

This comes barely a week after the government announced an ambitious plan to launch an urban passenger train connecting Nairobi suburbs to the city centre by June this year.

The project, co-financed by Kenya and Hungary, will ease traffic congestion in the city besides transferring technology to Kenyans.

President Uhuru Kenyatta welcomed the city tram project saying no “development-conscious Kenyan” would oppose such a project.

In December 2015, Kenya secured a USD1.5 billion loan from China to extend its railway from the capital to the Rift Valley town of Naivasha.

The Chinese-financed project is the first stage in a scheme that aims to extend to Uganda and other land-locked countries.

The SGR is a flagship project under the Vision 2030 development agenda.

The governments of Kenya and Uganda signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in October 2009 to construct the SGR from Mombasa to Kampala.

A tripartite agreement was signed by the governments of Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda in August 2013 to fast track the development of the railway to their respective capital cities.

The Ugandan section of the SGR line was launched in October 2014. The SGR line from Mombasa to Kigali is expected to be completed by 2018.

The Kenya Railways Corporation is responsible for the construction of the 1,300km-long track inside Kenya from Mombasa to Malaba via Nairobi.