ABSTRACT
In 2017, passenger and freight services began running on Kenya’s USD 3.2 bn Standard Gauge Railway. Connecting Nairobi with the port city of Mombasa, the project has been heavily scrutinised in terms of the soundness of the investment, its economic feasibility, its environmental impact, and its political ownership in the context of Kenya’s fiercely contested party politics. This chapter draws on 50 h of interaction with passengers inside its carriages and terminals to provide an account of the train from their perspective. It exposes certain features of the project that have been neglected elsewhere: narrative accounts of the railway, at times competing, that reveal how it influences everyday lives, how its political, historical, and regional contexts are understood by those who ride it, and how it reflects broader state-society relations in Kenya. The SGR project was motivated by political considerations as much as by the need for transportation, and the way it is reconstructed in the accounts of those who use it has significant, material implications for future infrastructure development throughout East Africa.
