p6 Eritrea Empire, Last Stop

Breda, Ansaldo and the Littorine went on undisturbed to perform their acrobatics on a track less than one meter wide (exact gauge 95 centimeters) also in the Fifties and in the Sixties, when Eritrea was annexed to the Ethiopia of Hailè Selassiè.
In 1965 they established the record, carrying 446 thousand passengers and 200 thousand tons of goods.
Italian railmen did not exist anymore, but one went on saying “rotaie, scambio, caldaia, tubi” (rails, switch, boiler, pipes).
“For sure” explains the depot chief Seium Baraki, “italian language is better: you write ‘acqua’ and say ‘acqua’; in English, instead, you write water and have to say ‘uotar’ and this is not suited to run trains.

Then, one morning of September 1975, one Ansaldo stopped in a cloud of steam in the damp heat of the Massaua station.
She would never more climb toward the clean and dry air of Asmara. From 1962 the eritrean Liberation Army and the ethiopic soldiers were fighting for a barren land, exacly like at the end of 1800 the italians of Baratieri and the warriors of Menelik, with the same wild will.
And the railway day after day went shorter, and then disappeared: the soldiers of both parts used the rails and the sleepers to strenghten the trenches and the bunkers.
That forgotten war lasted thirty years, the longest african indipendence war.
In 1991 the Addis Abeba regime led by the “red negus” Menghistu collapsed. In 1993 Eritrea had the indipendence.

The government of president Isayas Afeworki, made up of former warriors that after the liberation started to follow University courses by mail, thought of rebuilding the colonial railway, exactly as it was.
A project out of time, too costly, not realizable, declared the american and the british experts: the Saudis offered to buy the old locomotives in pieces as iron scrap.
The Asmara government went on alone. Why? “You italians were able to build roads and bridges, but you didn’t know that this railway would become a symbol of our national sovereignty: now, to rebuild it alone, using a pile of rusty iron , will proof to everybody the firm will of our people”, explains Ammanuel Ghebreselassie, the young former warrior that is coordinating the reconstruction.

“To rebuild it
with a pile of
rusty iron:
this is the sign
of our strength.”