“Every inhabitant of Thiès”, wrote a Senegalese novelist, Ousmane Sembène, in 1960, “depended on the railway.” Like many African cities, Thiès was a product of the continent’s first, colonial-era rail revolution. The French-built railway that ran through it stretched from the Senegalese port of Dakar to Mali, deep in the Sahel, ferrying peanuts, gold and other raw materials to the coast for export. But in recent decades the line has atrophied. A succession of foreign firms took over its management after it was privatised in 2003. Each failed to maintain or expand it. In 2018 the leg from Senegal to Mali halted operations entirely. Its rusting remains in Thiès lie under rubbish and weeds.

The story of west Africa’s most famous railway is a cautionary one for governments across the continent. Africa’s entire rail network is today only slightly larger than France’s and Germany’s combined. In west Africa only one cross-border line is still working. By one estimate, investments of up to $105bn a year until 2050 are needed if Africa’s network density is to match China’s or India’s. Yet between 2012 and 2022 total private investment in rail infrastructure was no more than $6bn, according to the World Bank. That was roughly the same as in the previous decade, despite a surge in infrastructure investment from China. Where Western firms have occasionally shown interest, grand promises have usually remained on paper.

Yet in at least some parts of the continent a new rail age may be emerging, fuelled by geostrategic rivalries and renewed competition over natural resources. In Angola a 1,300km colonial railway from the port of Lobito across the border to the copper mines of Congo is being revamped. In Zambia officials hope that 800km of track will soon be laid from the northern copper belt to the border with Angola (see map). The American government is funding at least $250m of the $2.3bn price tag, making the Lobito corridor, as the projects are collectively known, its largest-ever infrastructure investment on the continent. It is also a proving ground for the theory that competition between the West and China will benefit Africans.

America hopes rail investments can pull the resource-rich region into its orbit, and secure the minerals critical for the transition to green energy. Africa is home to around 30% of the world’s mineral resources. Zambia and Congo are Africa’s largest producers of copper, which is used in solar panels and wind turbines; Congo is the world’s largest producer of cobalt, which is used in batteries for electric vehicles. And Angola has 36 of the 51 minerals crucial to renewable-energy technologies.

China, whose firms own many of the mines and send their output home for processing, is gaining a stranglehold on supply. Amos Hochstein, Joe Biden’s envoy for energy security, hopes that, by redirecting exports to the Atlantic, supply chains will shift decisively westward. American officials are also currying favour with their African counterparts by investing in sectors such as agriculture and energy. That a Western-led consortium beat Chinese firms to the contract to rebuild the railway in 2022 was seen as a diplomatic breakthrough. The eu and the World Bank have since added their weight to the project.

China, alarmed by the apparently more pro-Western leanings of the governments in Angola and Zambia, has raced to respond. In February Chinese officials promised $1bn to refurbish a rival railway, built by Maoist China in the 1970s, from the copper belt to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. The catch, insiders say, was that the deal had to be announced before the Biden administration unveiled its own list of investments in Lobito. Zambia obliged.

Superpower rivalry offers Africa opportunities. “Playing them against each other is really helping us,” says a Zambian official. The government in Guinea—like those in Angola and Zambia—is keen to reduce the dominance of Chinese mining companies and to diversify its foreign partners. Last year it renegotiated the licences for a $20bn iron ore mine in order to ensure that a consortium of Chinese firms teams up with Rio Tinto, a Western mining giant, to jointly finance more than 600km of fresh tracks from the pits to the sea. The mining companies are expected to provide freight and passenger services, says Gerard Rheinberger, the managing director of Rio Tinto’s Guinea operations. The idea, notes a Western diplomat, is that the so-called Trans-Guinean railway “should not just take iron to the port, but open up the interior of the country as well”.

It is unclear, though, whether such high-profile projects can be easily replicated. Very few railways in Africa are seen by private investors as commercially viable. Ever since the colonial period those that are have almost always been linked to mineral extraction. Even then, the Trans-Guinean line, serving what is said to be the world’s largest mining project, is a rarity. A new scheme hatched by Robert Friedland, a Canadian mining tycoon, to raise $3bn-5bn for a similar line from the iron deposits of Guinea’s Nimba mountains to the coast of neighbouring Liberia, is “pie in the sky”, argues Nick Branson of Africa Practice, a consultancy. “These days it is only the highest-grade iron which warrants a new railway.” Nimba’s may not.

Most African rail investments are thus likely to need “de-risking” by development agencies or multilateral lenders. The American government is paying for the feasibility study for Lobito’s Zambian leg because, officials concede, the project would struggle to attract funding otherwise. Yet that makes projects vulnerable to political winds in foreign capitals.

For African governments the long-run challenge is to overcome the “pit-to-port” model that has defined the continent’s railways since their colonial heyday. To this end, the Angolan government signed a memorandum of understanding last year with the All-American Rail Group (aarg), an American rail consortium. The group intends to spend $4.5bn connecting Luanda, the capital, with Congo and says it will “integrate” places and industries far beyond mining. “In the past the focus was building a railroad,” says the aarg’s Jason Ford. “We want to help build an economy.”

Recent history does not inspire confidence. Ethiopia once planned a national rail network. So far it has completed only one line, which is drowning in debt due to instability and low traffic. Much the same can be said for Kenya, which spent $4.7bn revamping a railway inland from the coast that may never turn a profit (although Nairobi, the capital, once began as a railway depot). Elsewhere in the world railways have often helped build nations by spurring urbanisation, creating industrial clusters and delivering economic growth. If Africa’s latest railway age is to deliver these kind of spillovers it will have to go beyond merely connecting up commodity corridors to ports.