ABSTRACT
Although the British Colonial Office had carried out a survey in 1952 showing that a railway from Dar es Salaam in Tanganyika running south-west to Northern Rhodesia was a practical possibility nothing was done about it. This was in keeping with the general approach of the colonial powers that did not see transport routes as a means of linking colonies to each other; rather, railways were to move freight from the interior of a colony to its seaports for export to the metropolitan power. Intra-regional trade was simply not regarded as sufficiently important to warrant the construction of the missing link in the East African railway system: what, in fact, would become the Tanganyika–Zambia Railway, the TANZAM or TAZARA.
