President William Ruto’s Cabinet has signed off on the Nairobi Railway City Central Station & Public Realm Project, clearing the way for construction of a nine-platform, multi-modal hub meant to drag the capital’s creaking transport system into the 21st century.
According to the Cabinet dispatch, the old metre-gauge station will be ripped out and replaced by a glass-and-steel terminal able to move 30,000 passengers per hour and handle up to 600,000 commuters a day by 2045.
An elevated concourse will plug directly into BRT Line 3, several upgraded commuter-rail spurs and an SGR link to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, giving matatu-weary Nairobians their first realistic shot at seamless transfers.
Beyond the trains, planners say tidying up the 425-acre rail yard will unlock swathes of under-used land, extend the CBD southward and spark private investment in offices, housing and retail – think “Upper Hill but with working pavements.”
Treasury estimates the ripple could add tens of thousands of jobs and pump billions of shillings into the city’s economy, though no one is pinning down a cost-benefit ratio just yet.
Who’s footing the bill?
Design work was bankrolled by the UK government, with engineering giant Atkins Global drawing up the station blueprint in partnership with local firm Howard Humphreys. Nairobi is now haggling with UK Export Finance (UKEF) over a multi-billion-shilling loan package; sources say a term-sheet could be ready before the October UK-Africa Investment Summit.
Reality check
Kenya’s mega-projects have a habit of sprinting off the starting blocks only to limp across the finish line. In fact, this very project has been a series of broken dreams.
First proposed during the Uhuru administration, the Nairobi Railway City project was officially ground broken in December 2022, one of the first infrastructural acts of the first newly-elected president William Ruto.
3 years later, not even a shovel is on the ground, which is reason enough to take this with a grain of salt.
However, if the project pulls ahead, this is what you can expect the new station to look like:
Nairobi Railway City Design, by Atkins
