Mauritanian iron train .. in the footsteps of camel caravans in the desert

In a long field report from Mauritania, the French newspaper Le Figaro shed light on anonymous human activity organized along a railway stretching from the heart of the Sahara to the Atlantic Ocean through the most hostile landscape on the planet.

Adrian Gombo told the paper that the giant railway traversing 700 kilometers of the Mauritanian desert on rails is constantly threatened by sand encroachment, carrying iron ore to the export port of Nouadhibou.

According to the writer, the city of Zouerate, which is based on the extraction of metal, is regularly shaken by the explosions of dynamite in Jabal al-Hadid, which overlooks it. The French pilot, Antoine Dossant Exuberie, was said to have felt his magnet pulling his plane to the ground.

Every day, about 50,000 tons of metal travels from the city on the longest, slowest and heaviest train on the planet, providing the inhabitants of the Sahara with a means of illegally supplying and transporting.

Although iron was discovered since 1068 by an Arab man named Bakri, this desert was only crossed by caravans of salt until the French company "Mines of Iron Mauritania" (Miferma) was founded in 1952 at the foot of Kediyat al-Gel, where it established from nowhere the city of Zouerate, which will be a meeting point. Colonists and workers from all over the desert.

It was not as difficult for the new company to extract iron ore as it was to transport it to a port on the Atlantic for export, which did not take place until 1963, when the first train left the city of Zouerate to Nouadhibou on April 12 on its journey which is still repeated today despite the nationalization. French company and replaced by the National Company for Industry and Mines (SNIM) in 1974.

Although the transfer of iron was stalled in 1977 due to attacks by the Polisario Front (Western Front for the Liberation of Western Sahara) on the city, the work is still going on, although the city has lost much of its luster, Lemrabet, a retired teacher and museum president there.

Illegal travelers
Passengers are watching machines that crush metals, transporting them by heavy trucks to vehicles from over the houses for fear of missing the train, which leaves without a deadline when its cars are full.

The traveler may wait an hour, two hours or maybe a whole night because the train departs in the early afternoon, and the author tells us about the family of Dahan, who helps his wife to climb the train and take his son from a company employee as if it was a basket.

Dahan, who travels to Boulnouar, the last stop before Nouadhibou, is finally sitting on a bed of black rocks for a nearly 12-hour journey, although travel over ore is banned and overlooked.

He points to another man just steps away from Dahan trying to install some goats over the top of the wagons waiting for a friend to pick them up in Shum village on the road, while the end of the train is the cabin of the company's employees, where two friends are going on vacation and a young man is fed up with Zouerate. About working in Nouadhibou.

Desert Traps
Two kilometers from the cabin, the driver runs a 3,300-horsepower engine in preparation for dealing with the desert's unseen terrain. "The desert is not flat at all," he said, especially for those 16,000 tons up and trying to stop it down.

The writer pointed out that the maximum speed of this giant does not exceed 50 km per hour, and that the shepherds are racing towards the bars to receive the bread thrown by them assistant driver Osman from the window when the train passes, usually no one knows the beginning but the first link the people of the desert bread.

In a detailed description of the trip, the writer talks about the train stops and the crew lunch of rice, camel meat and mint tea they prepare, and notes the difficulties encountered by travelers on iron ores in preparing their food and tea as if the train became a mobile convoy reminiscent of the days of salt caravans on camels in these quarters.

He said that the state of the railway axes along the tracks was controlled by fiber-optic sensors at the Nouadhibou station to determine the weight and speed of the train. Sensor.

The writer limps on the dangers of these dwellings. A few months ago, at 560 km, Khadi saw six members of his family die in an electric shock during a violent storm. Supplying water, vegetables and food through a car passing weekly.

Storm the wagons
The writer describes the deadly tranquility in the village of Shum, where the paved roads stop where vendors and travelers waiting for a train do not know when to arrive before everything accelerates as soon as the giant approaches. They stay over iron ores by night in the face of a long and cold night.

Since there is only one pair of rails along the border with Western Sahara, the ore-carrying train is of the highest priority, making other trains resort to bypass roads and may stop.

The writer warns that the desert train is the source of life in these areas, where some passengers transport goods and water, while tourists find the opportunity to explore the area, thanks to which schools live in the villages on the way.

He describes the next stage of the journey when the signal was lost from laptops, and drowned the bars in an unclear dry horizon due to the scorching air, noting that beyond the village of Shum is not the same as before.

Upon arriving at Nouadhibou, the writer sees in Mauritania's economic capital only a huge suburb, dominated by Sneem (the largest job provider after the state), where iron ore is transported back to the ship cavities for export.