The railway line roughly follows old trade routes between the ancient trading centre of and its hinterland of the Bié plateau. In 1899, the Portuguese government initiated the construction of the railway hopper wagon" href="http://www.railway-wagon.com/hopper-wagon-1.html">
Passenger trains also ran between Lubumbashi and Lobito, connecting with passenger ship services to Europe. This provided a shorter route for Europeans working in the Katangan and Zambian Copperbelt, and the name "Benguela Railway" was sometimes used loosely to refer to the entire Lubumbashi–Lobito route, rather than the Luau–Lobito section to which it strictly applies.
In its heyday, the Benguela railway hopper wagon" href="http://www.railway-wagon.com/hopper-wagon-1.html">
Soon after Angola gained its independence from Portugal in 1975, the Angolan Civil War broke out. The railway was heavily damaged during the war and progressively fell into disuse. The workshops in Huambo were destroyed. Ballast cars had to be coupled to the front of locomotives to detonate mines. By 1992, only 340 km of the railway remained in operation. When the 99-year concession expired in 2001, only 34 km remained in service, along the coast from Benguela to Lobito.
The railway was 90% owned by Tanganyika Concessions Limited (Tanks), a London-based holding company. Société Générale de Belgique purchased a minority share in Tanks in 1923 and acquired a controlling interest in 1981. The Belgian company remained the controlling owner of the railway when the concession expired in 2001, at which point ownership of the railway passed to the Angolan government.
After the Angolan Civil War ended in 2002, the railway was reconstructed between 2006 and 2015 by theChina Railway Construction Corporation at a cost of $1.83 billion.
On 29 August 2011, Caminhos-de-Ferro de Benguela (CFB) resumed service linking Huambo with Benguela. CFB quit running the Benguela/Huambo route in October 1992 due to the armed conflict in Angola. After the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Lobito station, the guests rode a train along the Lobito/Benguela section using 54-person cars made in South Africa and a locomotive produced by General Electric that has been in service since 1973.
On March 31, 2012, a test train ran the 202 km from Huambo to Kuito in Bié Province (actually to Cunje, some kilometers north of the actual city), with transport minister Augusto da Silva Tomás on board.Tomás said that two teams worked on the reconstruction between the Bíe province and Luena, Moxico Province, one from Kuito eastward, and the other from Luena westwardOn 25 May 2012, a technical test train reached Luena, says Tomás. The government promised that the line would be operational up to the border station Luau, Moxico until the end of the year 2012. As in many infrastructure projects, the completion date has been delayed, but the connection to the DR Congo was expected to be complete by August 2013.
According to Jornal de Angola in May 2012, CfB employs 1,321 workers, and transported 129,430 passengers and 5,640 tons of goods in 2011. Two trains per day run between Lobito and Benguala, one per week to Huambo, and three per week between Lobito and Cubal. Rehabilitation continued in 2013; in August 2013 the first train reached the border town of Luau in almost 30 years.
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