Addis Ababa to Dire Dawa — Ethiopia's electric night train

Ethiopia scrapped its railway and built a new one. The metre-gauge line the French began in 1894 carried everything the country traded for most of a century, then fell apart for want of spare parts; by 2004 Addis Ababa had no rail link to the sea at all. What replaced it is not a restoration. It is 759 kilometres of new standard gauge, laid between 2011 and 2016, strung with 25 kV overhead wire from the highlands to the Gulf of Tadjoura, and worked by Chinese-built electric locomotives. Commercial operation began on 1 January 2018.

The passenger train that runs on it is train 101, and it leaves the western edge of Addis Ababa at half past seven in the evening on odd-numbered days. Ten hours and 446 kilometres later it is in Dire Dawa, having dropped more than twelve hundred metres off the plateau, crossed the Awash at the floor of the Rift and climbed out again into the Somali lowlands — almost all of it in the dark, which is the one honest complaint to make about it. There are seats, six-berth bays and four-berth compartments, and a foreigner pays exactly twice what an Ethiopian pays. The train goes on to Djibouti from Dire Dawa, but not as this train: that is a separate service, a separate ticket and, in practice, a night's stop in between.

The train does not start in Addis Ababa. It starts at Sebeta, a satellite town in the Sheger municipality south-west of the capital, and reaches the city proper an hour and a half later at Furi-Lebu — a long ochre station with domed corner finials, standing at 2,264 metres above the sea, which is the highest point anything on this journey reaches. Nearly everyone joins here. The overhead wires and the tall gantries are the first thing you notice: this is not a diesel railway that happens to have been modernised, it is an electric railway that was never anything else.

Out of Furi-Lebu the line runs east across the Oromia plateau, which is farmed to the horizon and green for much of the year. Bishoftu, an hour on, sits among a cluster of volcanic crater lakes that the town has built itself around. Modjo follows, and its dry port — Ethiopia's largest inland container terminal, and the reason most of the traffic on this railway is freight rather than people. Then Adama, at 1,644 metres, where the plateau ends.

Into the Rift

After Adama the railway falls. In the two and a half hours to Metehara it loses nearly seven hundred metres, dropping off the escarpment into the Great Rift Valley and running out onto the floor of it at 966 metres. This is the stretch the map is worth looking at even though you will sleep through it: acacia scrub, the black lava fields around Metehara, and then the Awash river, which the line crosses on a bridge of 155 metres at 870 metres above the sea — the lowest ground between Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa. Awash National Park, 827 square kilometres of savanna and palm-fringed river, lies along the track here. The train does not stop for it.

Beyond the river the railway climbs again, four hundred metres up to Mieso at half past four in the morning, then swings east and falls away a second time through Bike and down into the Somali lowlands. Dire Dawa arrives with the light, at 1,113 metres, in air that is already warm: the town averages 25.9 °C across the year and 35.6 °C on a June afternoon.

The train

Ethiopia owns exactly three electric locomotives built to haul passengers. They are CRRC HXD1C machines, 7,200 kW, geared for 120 km/h, and they carry the national colours — green, yellow and red — where the thirty-two freight engines carry blue in place of the green. One of the three is on the front of your train. Behind it comes a rake of maroon-and-cream coaches in three grades: Regular Seat, an ordinary reclining car; Economy Bed, open bays of six berths stacked three high; and VIP Bed, four-berth compartments with a door that locks. A single traveller can book a whole VIP compartment, which is as close to a private sleeper as this railway gets.

What you will not see, because it runs at the other end and mostly by day, is the international train onward from Dire Dawa to Djibouti. And what you may glimpse in the Dire Dawa yards is the railway this one replaced: French metre gauge, wooden-bodied vans, a semicircular roundhouse, and a station whose gable still reads Chemin de Fer Djibouto-Éthiopien in raised letters.

Train 101 runs east on odd-numbered days of the month; train 102 runs west on even-numbered days. There is no service in either direction on the days between, and the pattern resets at the start of each month, so two odd days can fall back to back.

Train 101 — Addis Ababa to Dire Dawa

Train 102 — Dire Dawa to Addis Ababa

EDR's booking system prints a flat ten hours for the run and stamps the arrival at 05:30, but its own intermediate times do not support that — the train is still at Bike, some seventy kilometres short, at 06:10. Plan on being off at Dire Dawa nearer eight, and treat the small hours as approximate.

Booking closes about two hours before departure. Onward to Djibouti, trains K1 and K2 work Dire Dawa to Nagad (Djibouti City) in six hours, K1 leaving Dire Dawa at 08:30 on odd days and K2 leaving Nagad at 08:00 on even days. Because 101 arrives on an even morning and K1 leaves on odd ones, a through trip east means a night in Dire Dawa; westbound, K2 gets in at 14:00 and 102 leaves the same evening.

Times as of August 2026, taken from EDR's own booking system at bookingedr.et (opens in a new tab), which publishes each dated departure and its calling times. The static timetable on edrsc.com (opens in a new tab) still shows an older daytime working and does not match.

Tickets are sold online at bookingedr.et (opens in a new tab), with no account needed. Ethiopians are checked against the national ID system as they book; everyone else enters a passport number instead, and the fare then doubles — a foreigner pays exactly twice the resident rate for the same berth, quoted in US dollars rather than birr. Under-fives travel free, one per adult.

The catch is payment. The portal takes Telebirr, Waafi, D-Money and CBE Birr, all of them Ethiopian or Djiboutian mobile-money schemes, and lists no international card, so a visitor without a local wallet is likely to be buying at a station counter or through EDR's call centre on 9546. Booking closes about two hours before departure. The ticket is a PDF with a QR code; bring the passport it was issued against.

Fares checked August 2026.

No rail pass covers Ethiopia. Interrail's One Country Pass list runs from Austria to Türkiye and stops there — every pass it sells is European, and there is no African or Ethiopian equivalent. Nor would there be much for one to do: the country has three railway lines, all built within the last decade, and no network for a multi-journey ticket to roam. Every seat and berth is bought for the individual journey.

That is not the constraint it sounds like. The whole 446 kilometres from Addis Ababa to Dire Dawa costs a foreign visitor about US$27 in a reclining seat and about US$62 in a locking four-berth compartment, which is not the sort of fare a pass exists to soften. What would genuinely help is a local mobile-money wallet, because that — not a card — is what the booking system takes.

Checked against EDR's booking system and the Interrail pass list, August 2026.

Almost the whole of this journey happens in the dark, which changes what "places along the route" means. The two ends are where the time goes: a day at Bishoftu on the way out of the plateau, and whatever you give Dire Dawa and the walled city beyond it at the far end. In between, Awash National Park is the one stop worth breaking the journey for in daylight — though not by this train, which passes it in the middle of the night and does not call.

Eastbound the train leaves late enough that you get a whole day in Addis Ababa first, and arrives early enough that a room in Dire Dawa is worth booking for the night you land rather than the night after. Westbound is the reverse: 102 pulls out of Dire Dawa at half past nine in the evening and sets you down at Lebu after eight the next morning.

Nothing stands at the stations themselves. Sebeta and Furi-Lebu are out on the south-western edge of the capital, well away from anywhere you would choose to stay, and Dire Dawa's new station sits about ten kilometres north-west of the town — the old station, in the Kezira quarter, is the one in the middle of things. Plan on a taxi at both ends.