Fifty new wagons procured for the Madaraka Express SGR freight service will improve rail services and efficiency, Roads and Transport Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen has said.

He yesterday dispatched the first batch of the wagons that arrived in Mombasa in January. “A second shipment of 250 wagons was loaded at the Tianjin port in China in late January and is expected to arrive this month,” Murkomen added.

Twenty of the expected wagons will also have power plug-ins to enable the movement of refrigerated containers, a hitherto untapped business potential for SGR.

The refrigerated wagons, he said, will be a big boost to Kenya’s horticultural sector, enabling rail services to respond to the preferences of customers from around the world.

“Railway transport is a key enabler of the aspirations set out in our country’s long-term development blueprint, Vision 2030.” Murkomen said.

“My Ministry, therefore, will ensure we have the requisite human capital, operational assets and information systems that are geared towards achieving this goal,” he said.

This is the first-time new wagons have been added since the launch of SGR in May 2017.

The wagons, he said, are part of Kenya’s strategic response to market dynamics, and the need to meet the ever-changing demands of customers and gain a competitive edge in the region.

“To this end, we are in the final stages of also concluding a cold-chain logistics agreement with our partners,” the CS said.

Kenya’s rail transport network – the standard gauge railway (SGR) and the metre gauge railway (MGR) continues to register significant gains, Murkomen said. MGR’s cargo volume, for instance, rose by 21 per cent from 787,000 tonnes in 2022 to 1,000,955 in 2023.