Before the railway, moving British and Egyptian troops south from Egypt into Sudan took around eighteen days - river steamers, camel caravans, and the slow misery of the Nile cataracts that snag any boat trying to ascend them. Kitchener, leading the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest of Sudan against the Mahdist State, needed something faster. If the railway worked, the same journey could be done in twenty-four hours. The route ran from Wadi Halfa, just above the Second Cataract, straight across the desert to Abu Hamed on the Nile - 380 kilometers of sand, rock, and nothing. The original plan had been to start from the caravan terminus at Korosko, but the route through Wadi Halfa was shorter, and an Egyptian steamboat ferry could cover the gap in between.

The workforce is where the story of the Sudan Military Railway becomes hard to tell honestly. Wikipedia's own summary says, with clinical brevity, that the line was built with the help of fellahin - Arabic for farmers - brought from Egypt, along with 200 convicts paroled for the job. Those fellahin were Egyptian peasants, generally conscripted under the pressures of colonial administration, who had few real alternatives when they were ordered onto a work crew bound for the middle of the Nubian Desert. The convicts were Sudanese and Egyptian prisoners swapping one harsh existence for another. Casualties and hardships were not systematically recorded in the British accounts. The standard telling credits Kitchener's organizational genius and Rhodes' donated locomotives. The people who actually placed the ties in 120-degree sun, who pounded in spikes with hands blistered raw, who carried rails across sand where no water was for fifty kilometers - they appear in the record as "labor," or not at all. Their names are not remembered. Their work is.

The engineering was imperfect. Contemporary accounts described "a fairly bumpy ride and frequent accidents - locomotives that flew off tracks and down 15 ft embankments were hoisted back on the rails and continued along as if nothing had happened." It is a line that reads as comic until you remember there were people on those locomotives. The unskilled character of much of the labor - men learning the craft as they laid it, with little proper equipment - produced rails that bent, grades that were steeper than they should have been, and ballast that settled unevenly in the shifting sand. Rhodes' donation of three locomotives, originally intended for his Cape-to-Cairo line, kept things moving when Kitchener's own rolling stock ran short. But the railway's main purpose was military, not elegant. It moved troops and supplies fast enough to let the Anglo-Egyptian army crush the Mahdist State at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. The ride could be rough. The empire would be built.

Kitchener's line connected Wadi Halfa with Khartoum North by 1899 and became the spine of Sudan's north-south rail network. It was on a different gauge from the Egyptian line - 3 ft 6 in versus the Egyptian 1435mm standard - which meant freight had to be transshipped at the border, a legacy decision whose consequences Sudan is still working around. The railway was the predecessor of today's Sudan Railway, which runs along much of the same alignment. The Egyptian Khedive Ismail had dreamed of railways across Sudan thirty years earlier, with 910 miles of new line reaching toward Khartoum, financed by cotton revenues that had quintupled during the American Civil War. Ismail's plans were shelved when the Egyptian state ran out of money. Kitchener's were built when a British empire decided to fund them - not to bring civilization to Sudan, as Ismail had imagined, but to feed and supply an army of conquest. The tracks are still there, in sections. So is the long complicated question of what that conquest cost the people who lived along them, and the people who built them.