Saharan Railway

What about Hollywood? Can't wait to see the Errol Flynn movie where he is in the French Foreign Legion and the train is attacked by Arabian bandits.

Murder on the Saharan Express?
 
I suspect you would need diesel engines. The logistics of making a steam engine run in the desert makes me shudder. Steam engines need clean water, and lots of it. Yes, it was done elsewhere in the world, but not on the scale mentioned. Also, metal thieves may be an issue.
 
Picturing train at dead stop because 50' high sand dune has drifted across track for next three miles. Conductor hikes up dune with binoculars, sees there's no going that way, and begins backing all the way to Adrar. Four hours later, encounters fresh dune blocking tracks they previously crossed.
 
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Is the maintenance/water usage etc. much different than the pilgrimage railway the Ottomans ran down to Medina? (which in a no WW1 scenario hooks up to the Berlin-Baghdad railway).

The Germans were to link up their railway in Kamerun all the way to lake Chad. No WW1 and you are talking about much greater African infrastructure improvements, if for no other good reason than national rivalry.

If you hook up the German and French west African systems, perhaps the Ottoman and Egyptian systems, much of the interior is easily reachable. With air conditioning and anti malaria drugs perhaps a big wave of excess European population coming to Africa (no wars).
 
Picturing train at dead stop because 50' high sand dune has drifted across track for next three miles. Conductor hikes up dune with binoculars, sees there's no going that way, and begins backing all the way to Adrar. Four hours later, encounters fresh dune blocking tracks they previously crossed.

Well according to the source the Vichy French planned to build a system of bridges and embankments and just go over the desert. Whether or not you could do that for thousands of miles is anyone’s guess.
 

kernals12

Banned
Well according to the source the Vichy French planned to build a system of bridges and embankments and just go over the desert. Whether or not you could do that for thousands of miles is anyone’s guess.
This seems like an incredibly complicated and expensive way to build a project that goes through barren nothingness.
 
This seems like an incredibly complicated and expensive way to build a project that goes through barren nothingness.
Without WW1, you could still have a lot of colonial hubris, "were going to make our colonies the best". There would be military considerations as well. It would open up the Niger valley and west Africa in general to a lot of commercial development. You might even have some industrial development in Algeria to handle the extra goods consumed.
 
Is the maintenance/water usage etc. much different than the pilgrimage railway the Ottomans ran down to Medina? (which in a no WW1 scenario hooks up to the Berlin-Baghdad railway).

The Germans were to link up their railway in Kamerun all the way to lake Chad. No WW1 and you are talking about much greater African infrastructure improvements, if for no other good reason than national rivalry.

If you hook up the German and French west African systems, perhaps the Ottoman and Egyptian systems, much of the interior is easily reachable. With air conditioning and anti malaria drugs perhaps a big wave of excess European population coming to Africa (no wars).

I have to second the questions here. How did the Germans/Ottomans manage it?
 
Really, I think it means very little. The expense of working (let alone building) a railway through a shifting desert, with water hungry locomotives would make shipping costs even more unfavorable vis-à-vis ocean shipping than already existed. Internal combustion motive power was not sufficiently developed at this time to be a viable alternative, and the cost (capital & supplying) of electrification would have driven the price tag to national-bankruptcy levels.

Most trade between France and her colonies will continue to be by sea, and the railway will become a little used money sink. I could see most of its traffic being simply its own supplies.

Possibly it would be of use in an earlier POD, if tensions with the UK make trade/reinforcement of French colonies via the open seas too risky. But then, you almost have to have a French/British naval rivalry in the Mediterranean. THAT would have quite an effect on "Africa, colonialism, European immigration to Africa etc."
 
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After doing a quick google search, this was an idea that floated about prior to 1900, and serious consideration was given to it. Considering that Britain built a railway in Sudan, and the Ottomans had railways in Arabia, I think the Saharan Railway is possible. Which brings me to a technical question, why can't the steam be captured and the water reused?
 
Yes, I think the actual construction of the railway is quite possible. But I don't think that there would be any reason to actually use it. An earlier POD, with France somehow gaining a large (or, really, resource rich) enough landlocked colony, with access to the sea threatened by other powers, would be about the only plausible reason I could conceive.

The use of condensing locomotives was tried in South Africa post WWII but a railway locomotive has limited space to put things, and condensation equipment takes up a lot of space. IIRC, the SAR locomotives were not a closed system but merely returned part of the steam to extend distances between water stops by some amount.
 
Really, I think it means very little. The expense of working (let alone building) a railway through a shifting desert, with water hungry locomotives would make shipping costs even more unfavorable vis-à-vis ocean shipping than already existed. Internal combustion motive power was not sufficiently developed at this time to be a viable alternative, and the cost (capital & supplying) of electrification would have driven the price tag to national-bankruptcy levels.

Most trade between France and her colonies will continue to be by sea, and the railway will become a little used money sink. I could see most of its traffic being simply its own supplies.
After doing a quick google search, this was an idea that floated about prior to 1900, and serious consideration was given to it.
The project began to take form in the 1870s after the end of French conquest of Kabylia, though there would be to wait until the 1890s to see a study commissionned by the government on its feasibility before fading into obscurity as noone bothered to invest in it. The first real attempt to build it was started by the Vichy regime, but quickly aborted due to the wartime context.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/europe/fr-trans-saharan-railway.htm

I imagine no ww2 and a longer lasting colonial presence would eventually lead to this attempt being undertaken more seriously.
Technically, the project was very feasible by the time technology. Actually, the reports advanced that the main difficulties would be building artworks, tunnels and bridges across the Atlas mountains to connect the Mediterranean coast with the Sahara interior where a flat land, not all the region is made of ergs (sea of dunes) but also of regs, or flat and rocky deserts, which make laying railroad pretty easy (not minding the temperature levels to work under) with estimated rate of 1 km per day, and as of water, it's largely available provided wells are drilled into the fossil aquifers of the region.
640px-Saharan_topographic_elements_map.png


Eventually, the Transsaharan route combined to the Marseille-Algiers shipping lane has the strategical advantage of shortening a lot the route to French colonies in West Africa and a much less exposed one as the Western Mediterranean is secure for the French navy, one of the most powerful navies of the world before ww2, well ahead of Italy, without counting British support.
Plus, water drilling would be probably leading up to an earlier development of Saharan oil, and make the railroad even more crucial infrastructure to support oil drilling in the region.
 
I can see various timelines where this railway would happen:

One can imagine a no WW1 scenario where Germany and Britain become closer (due to a rising Russia, Germany losing the naval race, colonial issues being settled, Portuguese colony split etc.). France worries about a war without Britain as an ally, the African railway would be a significant military advantage as France really only has to control the route from Algeria to southern France, even if the numerically superior German Navy controls all the other sea lanes.

OR a scenario Hitler dies in July 1940, no Barbarossa where the Vichy regime lingers on for several years.

OR any scenario (no ww1 or WW2) where colonialism isn't discredited, large Euro populations make many of these countries like Rhodesia and the colonial powers want to hang on. Having the railway would be both prestige and military important.

The Mauritanian ore train offers some idea of what a long desert route might be like:

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpictures/2016/03/iron-trains-mauritania-160308070717874.html

looks comfortable:

8f295d7d10a6462b81c62cb264cdaa52_8.jpg
 
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