There are no railways in Somalia and there are no plans to construction of new railway lines in the war-torned country in the future. In the past there were passenger trains in Somalia.
During the rule of the Italian colonial authorities, the Mogadishu-Jawhar (formerly Villabruzzi) railway line, also known as Ferrovia Mogadiscio-Villabruzzi, was built. The line had a length of 114 kilometers and was built to 950 mm gauge. There were seven railway stations and stops along the route. Initially, the line built after World War was intended to serve the suburbs of Mogadishu. In 1924 the railway line was was extended to Afgooye, and three years later to the settlements on the Shebelle River inhabited by colonists. The tracks reached Villabruzzi in 1928. Trains covered the 114-kilometer route in 3 hours and 40 minutes. The maximum speed was 90 km/h, which was an impressive speed for those times. The railway line was intended to facilitate the transport of agricultural products and sugar to the capital.
In 1930, the railway transported 19,359 passengers. Passenger trains in Somalia were very popular among locals and tourists.
The line was supposed to connect Mogadishu with Abyssinia (Ethiopia), but the outbreak of the Italo-Abyssinian War (1935-1936) thwarted the plans. Ultimately, there were plans to extend the line the port of Djibouti, , which would enable quick transport wood and coffee from the north of today’s Somalia to Italy. These plans also were abandoned.
As one of the maps cited by Wikipedia shows, 200 kilometers of railway line with a rail gauge of 600 mm was built from Villabruzzi to the Somali-Ethiopian border.
In 1941, British soldiers dismantled the railway line and sent some of the equipment to Eritrea, where locomotives and wagons were operated on the Massaua-Asmara line.
In the 1980s, there were plans to rebuild the line. Due to the political situation, the plans were abandoned and there is no indication that the railway will return to Somalia in the future.
According to the some sources, in the territory of Somalia there was a network of 600 mm narrow-gauge railways with a length of 45 km, used to transport goods, mainly sugar cane, from industrial plants.
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