Uganda Railway poster, 1908

Those aware of the modern African map may be puzzled by this scene showing mostly Kenya rather than Uganda, however, the railway linked both to the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa. Built by the British Foreign Office in the colonial period when it was all known as British East Africa (in the poster symbolically watched over by the British lion), construction of the line started at Mombasa in the Colony of Kenya in 1896 along a 600 mile (970 km) ox-cart track from Mombasa to Busia in Kenya that had been built a few years earlier, and reached Kisumu, on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria, in 1901. By 1931 it was extended to Kampala in the Uganda Protectorate. Although almost all of the railway was actually in Kenya, the original purpose of the project was to provide transport to carry raw materials out of, and manufactured British goods into, the Uganda Protectorate.

Today the remaing railway, known as the "lunatic express", is metre gauge, virtually all single-track, and divided between the Kenya Railways Corporation and Uganda Railways Corporation.