The Madaraka Express

Passengers off the morning train from Mombasa do not arrive in Nairobi. They arrive at Syokimau, on the edge of it, and the last twenty kilometres into the city are covered by a second train — older, smaller, running on rails 435 millimetres narrower — waiting on the far side of the concourse. That feeder is the Uganda Railway, the metre-gauge line driven inland from Mombasa from 1896, the line that put Nairobi on the map in the first place, and the line the Madaraka Express was built to replace. Its last through working to the coast ran on 28 April 2017. Thirty-three days later the new railway took its first fare-paying passengers, and what was left of the old one at each end was given a new job: delivering people to its successor.

The Madaraka Express covers 472 kilometres between the Indian Ocean and the Kenyan highlands in about five and a half hours, on standard gauge laid beside the old route at a cost of US$3.6 billion, ninety per cent of it borrowed from the Export-Import Bank of China. It crosses the corridor between Tsavo East and Tsavo West on viaducts raised clear of the ground so that animals can pass underneath; the metre-gauge line and the trunk road were both laid at ground level, and both killed wildlife for a century.

The name is the point of it. Madaraka is self-rule, and the first passengers travelled on Madaraka Day, 1 June 2017. The colonial railway was named for a country it barely touched; this one is named for a date.

The journey starts six kilometres inland from Mombasa island, at a terminus that looks like nothing else in Kenya: a drum of concrete and glass at Miritini, ringed with balconies, a control tower on the roof and the name across the front in red letters two storeys high. Nothing about it belongs to the old port city, and that is deliberate — the standard-gauge railway was laid as a separate route with its own alignment and its own stations, generally outside the towns they serve. Getting to it from Mombasa Railway Station, the 1901 terminus on the island, means the Link train, which Kenya Railways times to connect with each departure.

Out of Miritini the line climbs immediately. The Uganda Railway got up the hills behind the coast at Mazeras by winding round a spiral; the new railway crosses the same ground on two bridges, the higher of them 43.5 metres above the valley floor and the tallest structure on the route. There are ninety-eight bridges in all between the two termini, and the reason for so many is not only the terrain. Where the railway runs the length of the corridor between Tsavo East and Tsavo West national parks, its viaducts and embankments are lifted clear of the ground on purpose, so that elephant and buffalo can walk under the line rather than across it. The old railway and the Nairobi–Mombasa road were both built at ground level, and both spent a century killing animals.

What pulls it

The trains are Chinese, and so are the locomotives. Passenger workings are hauled by DF11 diesel-electrics built by CRRC Qishuyan, in the red, white and yellow of Kenya Railways; the same railway's freight, which is what the line was really built for, runs behind the heavier DF8B. There is no wire. Behind the locomotive the rake is economy, first class and — since a delivery of twenty coaches from CRRC Nanjing Puzhen in June 2024 — premium, which is a separate product with its own booking page.

Nine passenger stations stand between Mombasa and Nairobi, each given a different piece of architectural decoration drawn from its own district, and most of them serve towns that sit a few kilometres away across the scrub. Mtito Andei is a glass wedge in the middle of nowhere. Emali is a market town on the Mombasa road that the railway line splits in two: the rails are the constitutional boundary between Makueni and Kajiado counties, so half the town is administered from one county headquarters and half from the other.

Voi, and the railway underneath

Voi is where the two railways are easiest to tell apart. The SGR station stands out on the plain; the old Voi station is still down in the town, still worked, and still sees Kenya Railways 94 Class locomotives — General Electric U26Cs delivered in 1987 — bringing freight in off the metre gauge. Just outside it a plate-girder bridge carries the old Kenya–Uganda line over a river, and beside it stand the rusting steel piers of an older bridge again. Three generations of railway in one view, and only one of them has a passenger timetable.

Arriving at the edge of Nairobi

The last stretch is the flattest and the fastest. The line crosses the Athi plain on the Athi River Super Bridge, 2.6 kilometres long and at the time it was finished the sixth-longest bridge in Africa, and runs into Nairobi Terminus at Syokimau, out beyond the airport. The building was designed as a through station and originally called Nairobi South; it is a terminus only because the next phase had not been built when it opened, and trains now continue from it north-west to Suswa on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

The afternoon express takes five hours and eighteen minutes from Mombasa, an average of about eighty-nine kilometres an hour including its stop at Voi. What happens at the end of it is the part nobody photographs: the crowd off the train walks across the concourse and boards a metre-gauge commuter set for Nairobi Central Station — the same railway that used to make the whole journey itself.

Three trains a day run in each direction, and they leave Mombasa and Nairobi simultaneously — 08:00, 15:00 and 22:00 from both ends. The 08:00 is the Inter-County, which calls at every station; the 15:00 Express and the 22:00 night train run through, with a single stop at Voi.

The times below are Kenya Railways' own published schedule, read from the operator's site in August 2026.

Mombasa to Nairobi

Nairobi to Mombasa

The all-stations run takes six hours and ten minutes northbound and six hours flat southbound; the express takes five hours eighteen and five and a half hours respectively; the night train takes five hours fifty-five in both directions and puts its passengers on the platform before four in the morning.

Getting to the terminus

Neither terminus stands in its city, so Kenya Railways runs Link trains on the old metre-gauge network to feed them, timed against each departure. At the coast they leave Mombasa Railway Station at 06:25, 12:35 and 19:20 for the 08:00, 15:00 and 22:00 departures, calling at Miritini on the way to Mombasa Terminus. At the Nairobi end the connections from Nairobi Central Station are at 06:40, 12:50 and 20:10, and in the other direction Link trains leave Nairobi Terminus for the city centre at 03:50, 14:30 and 20:30, after each arrival.

The Suswa branch

The same railway continues past Nairobi Terminus to Suswa, in Narok County, on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays: 08:50 out, calling at Ongata Rongai, Ngong and Maai Mahiu and arriving at 11:10, and 16:05 back, arriving Nairobi Terminus at 18:10. On weekdays the same tracks carry a commuter service between Ngong, Ongata Rongai and Nairobi Terminus.

Departures and fares are published by the operator: Kenya Railways · Madaraka Express (opens in a new tab).

Seats are sold by Kenya Railways itself, through its own booking site or the ticket windows, and there is no third-party monopoly to work around. Fares are fixed by distance and class and published as a full station-to-station table, and they are among the cheapest long-distance rail fares anywhere for the distance covered: the full Nairobi–Mombasa run is KES 1,500 in economy, KES 4,500 in first and KES 12,000 in premium. Children of three to eleven with an adult pay half; under-threes travel free.

Tickets can be cancelled or moved, at a cost — thirty per cent of the fare to cancel and ten to reschedule, each confirmed by a code sent to the phone and email on the booking. Sold-out departures carry a waiting list that can be joined online. Fares as published by the operator, August 2026.

No rail pass covers Kenya. The country belongs to no international scheme, there is no national multi-journey ticket, and the Madaraka Express is not included in any product sold outside the operator's own booking system. Seats are bought singly, by class and by station pair, from Kenya Railways.

That is less of a loss than it sounds, because the fares a pass would have to beat are already very low — KES 1,500 in economy for the full 472 kilometres. The constraint on this railway is not the price of a ticket but whether there is a seat left on the train you want, and there are only three departures a day in each direction. Booking early is worth more here than any discount scheme would be.

The Link trains at either end are run by the same operator, on the metre gauge, and timed against each Madaraka Express departure and arrival. Kenya Railways publishes their times alongside the main schedule rather than as a separate product.

This is not a line where the interest is beside the track. The Madaraka Express crosses country most travellers come to Kenya specifically to see, and it does it without stopping in any of it: the national parks are reached from the stations, by road, and the train is simply the sensible way of getting to the gate. Voi and Mtito Andei are the two that matter — one for Tsavo East, one for Tsavo West — and Emali is the railhead for Amboseli and its view of Kilimanjaro.

At the ends are two cities that could not be less alike. Mombasa is a Swahili port with a Portuguese fort in the middle of it and centuries of Indian Ocean trade behind that. Nairobi did not exist until the railway needed somewhere to put a depot: the site was swamp, chosen in 1898 by the Uganda Railway's chief engineer for its altitude and its water, and the first train reached it on 30 May 1899. Its national park, seven kilometres from the city centre, was established in 1946.

The timetable does most of the choosing. The 08:00 and 15:00 trains both need a night at one end or the other, because the Link trains that reach the termini run to the same schedule and there is no late connection into either city. The 22:00 night train replaces one of those nights, at the cost of arriving at four in the morning.

Three places make sense: the coast north of Mombasa, where the beach hotels are; Voi, if the point of the journey is Tsavo rather than Nairobi, since the lodges there are a short drive from the SGR station; and central Nairobi, which the Link train reaches from the terminus. No prices, grades or ratings are given below, because none have been verified — each card says where the house stands and what it says about itself.