Transport: Zambesi Bridge

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Last week African blacks leaped up & down with excitement, British traders cheered and Scottish missionaries beamed broadly as a train tooted its whistle and chugged across the world's longest railroad bridge. Thus was railroad service inaugurated over the broad Zambesi River on a 33-span viaduct measuring more than two miles in length. The structure had taken two and a half years to build, had cost the Central African & Trans-Zambesi Railway Companies $10,000,000.

The new bridge means uninterrupted railway communication between Beira, Portuguese East African port, and Lake Nyasa, important link in the water route to the interior. Nyasaland, a British protectorate, ships its tobacco and other products through Beira on the Mozambique Channel. Up to now passengers and freight have had to ferry across the wide Zambesi, from railhead to railhead, on slow flat-bottomed river steamers. Now a motorist can entrain at Beira and get off next morning on the high plateau of Central Nyasaland.