The Line That Had to Carry More Than Ore
On 11 November 2025 the first iron ore left the Simandou range in south-eastern Guinea and crossed the country to the Atlantic on a railway that had not existed five years earlier. The interesting part is not the ore. It is the conditions Guinea attached to the track.
The first barge left the new port at Morébaya, south of Conakry, on 11 November 2025, carrying 9,850 tonnes of iron ore out to a bulk carrier waiting offshore. The ore had come from the Simandou range in Guinée Forestière, close to the borders with Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire, on a standard-gauge railway built across the width of the country. Depending on whether you count the spurs, the figure quoted for that railway runs from a little over 550 kilometres to about 670.
Guinea has had a railway across it before. What is different this time is not the engineering, which is conventional heavy-haul practice, and not the ore, which is among the highest-grade iron in the world at around 65 per cent. It is a set of conditions written into the deal: that the line be open to other users, that it carry things other than iron, and that in thirty-five years it stops belonging to the mining companies at all.
The line that stopped running
The Chemin de fer de Conakry au Niger was a metre-gauge single track of about 662 kilometres, begun in 1900 and reaching Kankan on the upper Niger by 1914. It was the spine of the colony and then of the independent state, and it carried passengers and freight both ways. It was also never renewed: services degraded through the 1970s and 1980s and the through line stopped running in the mid-1990s, and what is left between the coast and Kankan is a long scar of embankment. A commuter service was revived on the western end at the start of the 2010s to move people in and out of the capital, and that is the whole of Guinean passenger rail. Meanwhile Guinea became the largest bauxite exporter in the world, and the railways serving the mines around Boké run from pit to coast, private and dedicated and closed. They are extremely good at moving bauxite. They have never moved anything else, and the towns they pass are no better connected for their existence. A country can be crossed by working railways and still have no railway.
Two rivals, one railway
Simandou is divided into four blocks. Blocks 3 and 4 have been held since the 1990s by Rio Tinto, latterly through Simfer, in partnership with the Chinese aluminium group Chinalco; blocks 1 and 2 went, after the detour described below, to Winning Consortium Simandou, a mostly Chinese and Singaporean grouping. Each had its own plan to get ore out, and for years Rio Tinto's preferred answer was to build south-west through Liberia to an existing port — shorter, cheaper, and of no use whatsoever to Guinea. Two owners with two corridors is how most large mines in Africa have been developed, and it is why so few of them leave a usable network behind.
A mine builds a railway to get its own cargo out. A country builds one to get everything else out. The whole argument in Guinea has been about which of the two was being built.
The government stopped it. Work was suspended in 2022 until both sides agreed to build one shared line inside Guinean territory, and on 25 March 2022 a framework agreement was signed to that effect. In July that year the parties incorporated La Compagnie du TransGuinéen: Simfer and WCS holding 42.5 per cent each, the Guinean state 15 per cent on a free carry — a stake it does not pay for. All the co-developed rail and port infrastructure transfers to that company, which owns and operates it, rather than to either mine.
Multi-purpose, multi-user, thirty-five years
Two phrases do the work in the documents. Multi-user means the track is not reserved to its owners: other operators are to be able to run on it on published terms. Multi-purpose means it is not an ore conveyor — it is specified to carry general freight and passengers as well, which is why it connects towns rather than only pits. And after a thirty-five-year concession the whole thing, rail and port, passes to the Guinean state; the 15 per cent free carry is intended to become 100 per cent by expiry. The scale that pays for all of it is worth stating plainly: the two mines together are built for up to 120 million tonnes of ore a year, against a total project cost usually given at above twenty billion dollars. A general-freight wagon will be a rounding error in those economics. That is precisely why the obligation was written down rather than hoped for — a shared line only stays shared if somebody is contractually required to keep it so.
Seventeen years between the licence and the train
None of this arrived on schedule, and the reason is documented in three jurisdictions. In 2008, in the last months of Lansana Conté's presidency, Guinea stripped Rio Tinto of blocks 1 and 2 and awarded them to BSG Resources, the mining vehicle of the businessman Beny Steinmetz. In 2010 BSGR sold 51 per cent of the asset to Vale for about 2.5 billion dollars, having spent a tiny fraction of that acquiring it. In April 2014, after an investigation, the government of Alpha Condé annulled the rights on the grounds that they had been obtained by corruption; a BSGR agent, Frédéric Cilins, had already pleaded guilty in a New York court to obstructing a federal investigation. In January 2021 a Geneva court convicted Steinmetz of corrupting a foreign public official and sentenced him to five years, reduced on appeal in 2023, and in March 2025 he lost his final appeal in the Swiss courts. Seventeen years passed between the disputed award and the first loaded train, Guinea earned nothing from the deposit in any of them, and the argument was conducted almost entirely in courtrooms outside the country. It is hard to read the insistence on a state-owned railway company and a hard reversion date as anything other than the direct lesson of that period.
The test is a timetable
What has been proved so far is that ore can go west. The obligations that make this different from the bauxite lines are, for now, obligations rather than operations: no general freight tariff has become routine, no scheduled passenger service runs the length of the line, and the towns between Beyla and Forécariah are connected to each other by the same roads they had in 2020. Guinea has also just come through a political transition — a referendum in September 2025, then a December election won by Mamadi Doumbouya, the officer who took power in the 2021 coup — which leaves the institutions meant to enforce a thirty-five-year contract in a shape nobody can yet judge. So the fair way to assess the Simandou railway is not by tonnage. It is whether, in five years, you can buy a ticket on it, and whether a cooperative in Kankan can put a container on it at a rate that is published. Those are small, dull, checkable things, and they are the entire difference between a railway a country owns and a conveyor belt that happens to run through it.