Uganda Railway - Lunatic Express

The term Lunatic Express was coined by Charles Miller in his 1971 The Lunatic Express: An Entertainment in Imperialism. Contemporary tabloid reports also referred to the "Lunatic Line", while Africans called it the Iron Snake. It was defended in the British Parliament by Sir Gerald Portal who felt all the right reasons were there: the need to ensure protection of the source of the Nile from Britain's enemies, a great potential market for British goods, the huge traffic expected, and a revolutionary effect in settling the region.

Political resistance to this "gigantic folly", as Henry Labouchère called it, surfaced immediately, with the Liberals pronouncing that the Government had no right to drive a railway through country owned by the Maasai. And by what right did England have to assert mastery over thousands upon thousands of unlettered African tribesmen? Such arguments along with the claim that it would be a waste of taxpayers' money were easily dismissed by the Conservatives. Years before, Joseph Chamberlain had proclaimed that, if Britain were to step away from its "manifest destiny", it would by default leave it to other nations to take up the work that it would have been seen as "too weak, too poor, and too cowardly" to have done itself. Estimated at £3 million in 1894, over £170m in 2005 money, when the books were closed in 1902 the final cost was $793 million.

Due to the shaky-looking wooden trestle bridges, enormous chasms, prohibitive cost, hostile tribes, men infected by the hundreds by diseases, and man-eating lions pulling railway workers out of carriages at night, the name "Lunatic Express" certainly seemed to fit. Winston Churchill, who regarded it "a brilliant conception", said of the project: "The British art of 'muddling through' is here seen in one of its finest expositions. Through everything—through the forests, through the ravines, through troops of marauding lions, through famine, through war, through five years of excoriating Parliamentary debate, muddled and marched the railway."