Moramanga to Ambila-Lemaitso

Four mornings a week a single train stands at Moramanga, a highland market town on the road east from Antananarivo, and at seven o'clock it starts down the escarpment towards the sea. Nine hours later it is at Ambila-Lemaitso, a village of sand and screw pines held between the Canal des Pangalanes and the Indian Ocean. Between the two lie 163 kilometres of metre gauge, the rainforest of Andasibe, the valley of the Vohitra, and a string of halts — An'ala, Ambatovola, Andekaleka, Lohariandava, Fanasana, Razanaka — that the national road never reaches. Madarail, which runs the line, describes the service in one flat sentence: it exists "exclusively for carrying people in the isolated zones". The train is called the Dia Soa, which is Malagasy for a good journey.

It is the surviving passenger service on the Tananarive–Côte Est, the first railway built in Madagascar and still the only one that reaches the country's main port. Passenger trains stopped here in 1996 and stayed stopped for a quarter of a century; a first attempt to bring them back in 2021 was cut short by cyclone damage to the formation, and the trains ran again from 1 June 2023. What runs today is two coaches of eighty-eight seats and two vans for the luggage, hauled by one of Madarail's diesels through country where the freight — chromite, fuel, cement, rice — pays for the railway and the passengers ride on the margin of it. It is slow, it is not comfortable, and for the villages along the Vohitra it is the difference between a market and no market.

Moramanga sits at kilometre 122 of the Tananarive–Côte Est, where the line from the capital meets the branch north to Lake Alaotra. It is a junction town of some fifty-seven thousand people, and it carries one of the heaviest memories in the country: on the night of 29 March 1947 the military camp here was among the first places attacked in the rising against French rule, and the cemetery of the victims is still one of the stops Malagasy travellers make.

From the station the train turns east and begins to lose height. Twenty-six kilometres out it calls at Andasibe, the old Périnet, where the rainforest closes over both sides of the track and the station buildings — brick, stone arcades, a steep tin roof — are the smartest thing on the line by some distance. Below Andasibe the railway takes to the valley of the Vohitra and follows it down the escarpment through An'ala, Fanovana, Ambatovola and Andekaleka, crossing and recrossing a river that runs brown after rain and clear when it has not rained for a week. This is the section with no road worth the name. It is also the section the cyclones take out: the forest at Andasibe takes 1,700 mm of rain a year on 210 days of it, and when the formation goes the villages between the halts have nothing.

Down to the coast

At Anivorano, kilometre 255, the train passes the place where the first rails in Madagascar were laid, in April 1901, by thousands of Malagasy labourers the colonial administration called volunteers and conscripted as forced labour. By then the country has opened, the palms have started, and the last of the highland cool is gone. Two stops later comes Brickaville — Vohibinany on the timetable, kilometre 271 — a sugar town on the Rianila where the river widens into an inland harbour and the pirogues load. Here the line divides: north to Toamasina and the port, or the fourteen kilometres east that the Dia Soa takes, out onto the sandbar.

That last stretch is the one people remember. The track threads the strip of land between the Canal des Pangalanes — the chain of lagoons and cuts that runs some 700 kilometres down this coast from Farafangana to Toamasina — and the open Indian Ocean, close enough that both are in the same window. Ambila-Lemaitso means, near enough, "Ambila the green"; vila are the wooden fish traps staked out across the canal, and they are the first thing a passenger sees on the water. The train stops. The road in from Brickaville runs out at the bank, and the last stage of any other way here is a ferry.

What hauls it, and what it looks like

The diesels are plainly lettered — red cab, yellow band, the operator's name in a white swash and a running number such as AD 1805 on the flank; the builder's plates on this railway's newer metal read CSR Sifang, China. Behind the locomotive, four days a week, go two saloons in the same red livery, eighty-eight seats apiece, and two vans that take whatever will not fit under a seat: rice, charcoal, fruit, poultry, timber. On the other days the same metals carry the traffic that actually pays the bills — hydrocarbons in tank wagons, chromite off the Lake Alaotra branch, cement, iron, rice and cereals.

The average over the run is about eighteen kilometres an hour. Nobody on board treats that as a fault. The train stops where there are people, and where it stops a market forms alongside the coaches for as long as it stands there — which is most of the reason the schedule allows nine hours for a distance that a car, if there were a road, would do in three.

The Dia Soa runs four days a week, out to the coast on Sundays and Thursdays and back inland on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Every working leaves at 07:00 and is booked into its destination at 16:00 — nine hours for 163 kilometres. There is one train each way on each of those days and nothing on Mondays, Wednesdays or Fridays.

The intermediate halts — Andasibe, Andekaleka, Lohariandava, Fanasana, Razanaka, Anivorano, Brickaville and the rest — are not published with individual times, and in practice the train reaches them when the loading at the previous one is finished. Treat 16:00 as an intention rather than a promise: nine hours is the booked time, and the run has no margin built into it for a fallen branch, a washout or a long stop.

Season matters more here than the day of the week. The dry months, roughly May to October, are when the line is most reliable. Between December and March the cyclones come, and this railway has a long record of being cut by them — the 2021 attempt to restart passenger trains ended that way, with the track blocked by storm damage before the service had established itself. If you are planning around the Dia Soa in the wet season, plan a way out that is not the Dia Soa.

Times as of September 2026, from Madarail's own passenger-train page: madarail.mg (opens in a new tab). The operator publishes no telephone booking and no online sale; the commercial department takes enquiries on +261 20 22 345 99.

There is no online sale and no agency. Tickets are written out at the station, in cash, in ariary: Madarail runs the passenger train in partnership with the communes along the line, and it is the communes that sell the seats and manage the platforms. Expect a name and an identity number to go into a ledger as well as onto the ticket, so carry a passport.

Madarail has published no tariff for Moramanga to Ambila-Lemaitso. The only fares it announced when the service reopened were on the Toamasina workings — 7,000 ariary second class, 15,000 first, for the full run out of Moramanga — which give the scale rather than a quotation. What runs today is two 88-seat saloons; the six coaches Madarail has bought since, four second class and two first, were still being commissioned when it last said so.

No rail pass covers Madagascar, and none would be worth carrying if one did. The country has two metre-gauge systems that do not touch each other — Madarail's in the north-east, the Fianarantsoa–Côte Est far to the south — and between them they run a handful of scheduled passenger workings a week. There is no through ticketing, no network map to spend a pass across and no multi-journey product of any kind.

Tickets are bought singly, at the station, for the train you are taking. Budget for the fare in cash and for the far larger cost of the days either side of it, because the Dia Soa only runs on four of them.

The line's great advantage is that it puts the rainforest and the coast on the same ticket. Andasibe is twenty-six kilometres out of Moramanga and is the reason most visitors come to this side of Madagascar at all; Ambila-Lemaitso, nine hours further on, is where the island runs out into the Indian Ocean. Everything below is within reach of a station on the run.

Sleep at the ends and in the middle. Moramanga is where the train starts and the only town on the run with a range of rooms; Andasibe, twenty-six kilometres down the line, is where the lodges are, because the national park brings the visitors. Between Andasibe and the coast there is nothing that takes bookings.

At the far end, Ambila-Lemaitso does have places to stay — bungalows on the sand and on the canal — but none of them keeps a website of its own, only entries in directories we cannot vouch for, so there is no card for the arrival end here. Ask at Brickaville or arrange it through whoever takes you across the water.

Getting to the start. Moramanga is on the RN2 east of Antananarivo, three to four hours by road, and every taxi-brousse heading for Toamasina passes through it. The station is in the town.

Getting back. The train is the only reason to be at Ambila-Lemaitso if you have not planned the return, and the next one inland leaves two or three days later. The alternative is the ferry across the canal and a rough eighteen kilometres of track to the RN2 near Brickaville, where the buses run.

Money and language. Ariary, cash, small notes. French is the working language of the railway; Malagasy is what is spoken on the platform, and English will not get far.

What to take. Water and food for the whole nine hours, though there is plenty sold at the halts. Something dust-proof for a bag. The saloons have bench seating and no catering, and the two vans behind them are where anything large travels.