In 1908, Winston Churchill gave his assessment of the recently-built Uganda Railway, which began at Mombasa in Kenya. He said that the concept was visionary, but thanks to the politicians who thought of it and then abandoned it, and others who took it up eagerly and then mismanaged it, costs were too high and the route was ill chosen.

After admitting that the Uganda Railway project was badly bungled, Churchill stressed that it was nevertheless an extraordinary achievement. It had tamed challenging terrain; it had slashed journey times from weeks to forty-eight hours; but more simply, the British had conceived and delivered a project of a kind that other colonial powers seemed content to dream about.

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