If the current “Railway Masterplan” is not interrupted, there will be over three thousand eight hundred kilometers of standard gauge rail lines to touch all 16 regions in Ghana.
This was disclosed by Yaw Owusu, CEO of Ghana Railway Development Authority in a Diaspora Weekly interview that aired last Saturday on DNT.
Beginning in 2017, a network of over 200 kilometers of rail lines have been built with another 300 kilometers on track to be built by the end of 2024, including a 300-meter suspension bridge over the Volta lake for trains.
Owusu further disclosed that contracts in the pipeline amount to over $2billion.
The re-instated ministry of Railway Development in 2017 by the Nana Addo administration along with the revamping and resourcing of the Ghana Railway Development Authority resurrected a railway industry that had been neglected since independence.
But as Owusu intimated, “throughout history, railway is the bedrock of any socio-economic transformation anywhere you go.” Indeed railway and industrialization go hand in hand as it provides the most affordable freight compared to road transport.
Accordingly, the initial focus of the lines constructed have been trained on the mineral rich areas connecting them to the ports and industrial centers.
Emphasis has also been placed on linking Ghana’s northernmost point of Paga to the ports in the south to offer rail option to Ghana’s landlocked neighbors to relieve the pressure on roads.
The industry is being built for the long term because a whole Railway University has also been established equipped with a state-of-the-art servicing depot to train Ghanains to work on the trains when they need repairs.
DNT News, Accra
