<P> The British South Africa Company was responsible for building the Rhodesian railway system in the period of primary construction which ended in 1911, when the main line through Northern Rhodesia reached the Congo border and the Katanga copper mines . Rhodes' original intention was for a railway extending across the Zambesi to Lake Tanganyika, popularly considered as part of a great "Cape to Cairo" railway linking all the British colonies of Africa . Rhodes was as much a capitalist in his motivation as a visionary, and when little gold was found in Mashonaland, he accepted that even the scheme to reach Lake Tanganyika had no economic justification . Railways built by private companies without government subsidies need enough of the type of traffic that can pay high freight rates to recover their construction costs . The agricultural products that fuelled much of Rhodesia's early economic growth could not provide this traffic; large quantities of minerals could . Most early railways in Africa were built by the British government rather than Chartered Companies . The need to raise capital and produce dividends prevented most Chartered Companies from undertaking such infrastructure investments . However, in the early period of railway construction, the BSAC obtained finance from South African companies including Consolidated Gold Fields and De Beers in which Rhodes was a dominant force . BSAC also benefitted from the large, but not unlimited personal fortunes of Rhodes and Beit before their deaths . </P> <P> Lord Gifford and his Bechuanaland Exploring Company had won the right to construct a private railway north from the terminus of the Cape Government Railways at Kimberley into Bechuanaland in 1888 . Rhodes was initially against this extension, in part because Gifford was a competitor but also for reasons of Cape politics . However, when Rhodes and Gifford joined forces, BSAC had to take on this railway obligation to gain its Charter . Rhodes promised that BSAC would spend £ 500,000 on building a railway through Bechuanaland, half of BSAC's total initial share capital . The railway reached Vryburg in 1890, stopping there until 1893 because of the poor financial state of BSAC and disappointing reports about gold in Mashonaland and Matabeleland . BSAC remained cautious about railway building until 1896, when African uprisings threatening its investment made railway links to Southern Rhodesia imperative . </P> <P> The line from Kimberley reached Bulawayo in 1897, and a connection to Salisbury was completed in 1902 . By then Southern Rhodesia already had a rail outlet to the Mozambican port of Beira . This was completed by the Beira Railway Company, a subsidiary company of the BSAC, as a narrow gauge railway as far as Umtali in 1898 . In the next year, a line from Salisbury to Umtali was completed which, like the Kimberley to Bulawayo line, was at the Cape gauge of 3 feet 6 inches . The Umtali to Beira section was widened to Cape gauge in 1899 and 1900 . These lines were proposed before the economic potential of the Rhodesias was fully known, and in the hope that the expected gold discoveries would promote economic development . Rhodesia's gold deposits proved disappointing, and it was the coal of Wankie that first provided the traffic and revenue to fund railway construction to the north . After the discovery of its huge coal reserves, a branch to Wankie from the main line from Bulawayo (which had been extended to cross the Victoria Falls in 1902) was completed in 1903 . </P> <P> The next section was to Broken Hill, which the railway reached in 1906 . BSAC was assured that there would be much traffic from its lead and zinc mines, but this did not materialise because technical mining problems . The railway could not meet the costs of the construction loans, and the company faced major financial problems, which were already serious because of the cost of widening the Beira railway . The only area likely to generate sufficient mineral traffic to relieve these debts was Katanga . Initially, the Congo Free State had concluded that Katanga's copper deposits were not rich enough to justify the capital cost of building a railway to the coast, but expeditions between 1899 and 1901 proved their value . Copper deposits found in Northern Rhodesia before the First World War proved uneconomic to develop . </P>

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