The East African Railways and Harbours ran buses. So did the company before it, and the company before that. This surprises people, but it should not: a railway that stopped 600 kilometres short of where its passengers were going had no choice.
The road services are the forgotten half of the story, and they are the half that explains why there is a hundred-year-old hotel in Masindi.
How far the rails actually went
The original Uganda Railway reached Kisumu, on Lake Victoria, in 1901. That was the end of the track. Passengers for Uganda transferred to a lake steamer for Port Bell, and from Port Bell an eleven-kilometre branch ran up to Kampala. The main line was not carried through from Nakuru to Kampala until 1931.
Beyond Kampala there was no railway at all in the direction most travellers wanted to go — north-west, towards Lake Albert, the Albert Nile, the Sudan and the Congo. There was a road. So the railway company ran the road.
The company’s own buses and lorries
Across the network, road services were operated by the railway itself rather than left to whoever happened to own a lorry. Timetables were written so that a bus met a train, and a lorry met a ship. On the southern part of the system the road arm traded under the name Tanganyika Road Services; in Uganda the same principle applied on the routes out of the railhead.
The point of it was continuity of ticket and continuity of responsibility. You could hand your luggage over at Mombasa and find it again at a lake port days later, having crossed water, rail and road belonging to one administration. In 1923 that was a considerable thing to be able to promise.
The road west
The route that matters to us runs north-west out of Kampala, through Masindi, and then down the escarpment to Butiaba on Lake Albert.
Butiaba is not much to look at now. For forty years it was the port for a whole quarter of the continent. From there the company’s ships worked the lake and the Albert Nile: north towards the Sudan, west towards the Congo, and on a fortnightly run to Kasenyi. Cotton, coffee, machinery, mail and passengers all moved through it.
Masindi sits on that road, at about the right distance for the end of a day’s travel and before the descent to the lake. That is not a coincidence, and it is not romance: it is why a hotel was put here in 1923, and why the road outside is called Butiaba Road.
What the journey was like
Assembling it from the timetable rather than from anyone’s memoir, a traveller heading for the Congo in the 1920s would have gone by train from Mombasa to the lake, by steamer across Lake Victoria, by road to Masindi, spent the night, and gone on down the escarpment to Butiaba to pick up a ship. Four modes of transport, one company, and one stop in the middle of it where the beds were.
The clearest surviving evidence of what that road carried is the SS Robert Coryndon. She was an 860-tonne steamer, built in England in 1929 and 1930 for service on Lake Albert — a lake she could not reach by water. She was brought in sections, and every component had to be small enough and light enough to travel by lorry. That lorry route came through Masindi. A ship went past this hotel in pieces.
What happened to it
The system came apart in stages. The main line finally reached Kampala in 1931, which took some of the pressure off the road. Air travel took the passengers who could afford it. In 1962 flooding destroyed the port works at Butiaba and the Robert Coryndon ran aground; she was never refloated. In 1977 the collapse of the East African Community broke the corporation itself into three national railways.
Butiaba today is a fishing landing with the remains of a steamer in the shallows. The road is still there, and still busy — it is now the way to the Bugungu gate and the western side of Murchison Falls, and to the oil fields along the Albertine Graben.
Why we keep telling this story
Because it is the reason the building exists. Masindi Hotel was not built as a safari lodge and it was not built for a view. It was built as infrastructure — the sleeping part of a transport system, put where a day’s journey ended.
The transport system is gone. The town has grown around the site. Everything the hotel is now — the verandas, the gardens, the rooms named after the guests who used them — sits on a decision made a hundred years ago about where travellers would need to stop for the night.
The company that made that decision changed its name twice; we set the chronology out properly in Wagon of Smoke. The hotel’s own century is on our history page.
Related reading: Wagon of Smoke: An Informal History of the East African Railways and Harbours