A century after the French laid a railway in eastern Ethiopia, the old track remains necessary for trade and transport, even with the recent arrival of a modern line built by China.
In the pre-dawn darkness, the train pulls away from Dire Dawa station with the creaking of metal. The wagons are almost 70 years old and despite a recent Chinese line, the railway built by the French in Ethiopia more than a century ago remains indispensable. The diesel locomotive pulls four wooden freight cars and two faded metal passenger cars – model 1955 – plunged into darkness, the electric lighting no longer working. On the wooden benches, a hundred passengers and their luggage – mostly goods – begin a journey of about twelve hours to connect this city in eastern Ethiopia to Dewele, on the Djibouti border. There, they will sell vegetables and khat – a euphoric plant – and bring back food from the port of Djibouti.
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This train is “our means of transport”explains a young shopkeeper refusing to give her name, who “go buy rice, sugar, pasta, spices, tomato sauce, oil”. The tortillard performs this journey of approximately 200 kilometers two days a week, the only still passable portion of the 784 kilometers of the original line which linked the center of Djibouti-ville to the heart of Addis Ababa. Since 2016, a modern train has linked the two capitals in 12 to 18 hours, on an electrified line built by China. But in Dire Dawa, a city born at the beginning of the 20th century with the arrival of “Franco-Ethiopian Railway” (CFE), the “Chinese train” does not convince everyone.
Existence linked to the train
As in Addis and Djibouti, its station is out of town and the ticket price is higher. Above all, it only stops at three stations between Dire Dawa and Dewele, compared to eight for the “French train”. “The (Chinese) train does not stop at any station near us”, explains the young shopkeeper. Historically, “People have settled near train stations. Some places are inaccessible by car and the only means of transport is the train»recalls Mulugeta Kebede, 70, driver of the “old train” for four decades. “People say that (the modern Chinese train) is a plane that is useless” because it does not stop anywhere, ironically Ismail Khayad, deputy director general of the “Dire Dawa-Dewele Railway”, now run by local authorities. Along the old line, “people’s existence depends on the train”, testifies Ayoub Asofa, 62, head of the Chinile “stop”, miserable hut and first stop about ten km from Dire Dawa. They “bring vegetables to the Djiboutian border and come back with food (…) If the train stops, these foodstuffs will no longer be affordable”.
slow decline
Nostalgia and bitterness mingle among the railway workers of Dire Dawa, a pretty town with streets shaded by trees built by the French. At the old station, signs in Amharic and French, a language that some old railway workers still speak, recall its past. Work on the CFE, desired by Emperor Menelik, began in 1897 in Djibouti, when “French Somali Coast”. The line reached Dire Dawa, 311 kilometers to the south, on Christmas 1902, and Addis Ababa in the summer of 1917. “It was the railroad that founded this city”, recalls Ismail Khayad. His workshops were set up there. An economic crossroads, the city was for a long time the most populated in Ethiopia behind Addis Ababa.
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The decline of the train began in the 1970s with the rise of road transport to the access to the sea then offered by Eritrea, annexed since the 1950s by Ethiopia. Decrepit equipment, frequent derailments, infinite slowness… The line has gradually fallen into disuse. In the early 2000s, the Addis-Dire Dawa section was abandoned, then the Djiboutian portion. Of the more than 2,500 employees, only 300 remain. Tank cars or luxury couchette cars rust on the sidings of Dire Dawa station. In parallel, “the city has also deteriorated economically and socially”saddens Ismael Khayad, accusing the Ethiopian government of having “abandoned” railroad and railroad workers.
Centenary know-how
So that the old train runs, the historic workshops continue to work. Patinated metal machines (lathes, milling machines, grinding machines, etc.) are sometimes as old as the train. “Elwell & Seyrig, Plaine St-Denis, 1903”displays on its steel plate the oldest, a “vertical groover” that Belay Mulu, 53, a milling machine for more than three decades, sets in motion to prove that it works. On his milling machine – more recent – he repairs and rebuilds, because “we do not buy any spare parts”. The workshops no longer housed more than a few dozen workers. Young people are rare. “We don’t have much work now, because there is not much traffic”regrets Berhanou Bekele, 60, head of the department “Repair of towed equipment”.
Like the train, these workshops are crucial for the region. “We also work for hospitals”, says Belay Mulu while machining a part for a washing machine in the city hospital, whose beds are also being refurbished. Technical manager of a detergents factory, Woubest Arefe, 60, observes a pipe bender bending steel beams which will ring cisterns. “There is no workshop like this” 500 kilometers around, he says: “it’s almost a factory” with its foundry and its metallurgical, carpentry and electrical workshops. “Without him, we would have to import these parts from China (…) or go to Addis, which would cost us transport, time and perhaps also precision in the work. (…) Here, the staff is very talented». Railwaymen and workers refuse that this century-old know-how disappears. Belay Mulu trains young people “for the sustainability of this workshop and this machine”. This knowledge, “we received it from our elders and must pass it on to the younger generation to preserve it”insists Ahmed Abdallah, a 53-year-old driver. “People grow old, but knowledge never grows old”.