RAIL-122 RAIL TRANSPORT IN ETHIOPIA - RAIL TRANSPORT IN WORLD COUNTRIES SERIES VOL-02
krishna rao khanapur
All railways in Ethiopia are owned and operated by an Ethiopian state-owned enterprise, the Ethiopian Railway Corporation (ERC). A planned legislation opens rail transport to the private sector, from the construction of rail infrastructure to the operation of the same infrastructure and on to the operation of privately owned trains.
History
20th century
For more than a century, Ethiopia was served by an international metre gauge railway, from Addis Ababa to the Red Sea port of Djibouti City in Djibouti. The privately built railway primarily served economic purposes. That century-old railway, built from 1897 to 1917, the Ethio-Djibouti Railway and its decades-old rolling stock eventually lacked spare parts and was partially closed down over a number of years after the end of the 20th century. Addis Ababa lost its access to the Red Sea in 2004.
The original plans from the beginning of the 20th foresaw an extension of the railway from Addis Ababa to the Didessa River near Jimma to have full access to the main coffee-producing areas of Ethiopia, but that plan was scrapped already more than 10 years before the railway finally reached Addis Ababa in 1917. In the late 1930s, during the period when Ethiopia was under Italian rule, the Italian administration proposed the construction of several new railways: the Addis Ababa–Dessie–Massaua Railway, the Gondar–Dessie–Assab Railway and the Addis Ababa–Dollo–Mogadishu Railway. These railways would cement the Italian colonial rule in Ethiopia, and economically justified operation was not foreseen. The projects were abandoned due to the outbreak of World War II when Ethiopia regained its sovereignty.