The Railways Museum.

The security guard at the museum gate allowed me in. It was approximately a hundred meters of a winding pathway to the main archives' house situated in the middle of the museum compound. I followed the direction pointers on the signboards along the path leading to the museum.

Adjacent to the pathway on my left were myriad railway lines running parallel to one another, separated by narrow strips of neatly mowed lawns that were as wide as the railway lines themselves. Between this "display" of railway lines and the visitors' pathway was a wire mesh fence keeping the museum compound out of bounds to the incoming visitors who were yet to pay for the facility. This maze of railway lines had a unique reference point and as I took the last left turn towards the museum hall, I saw, for the first time in my life, how the end (or is it the beginning?) of a railway line looks like.

The rail beams curled upwards in a winding curvature that ended mid-air in a half circle approximately two feet high off the ground. Astounded, that became the first image on my "Railways museum visit" image folder in my camera.

So I arrived at the museum hall and made my payment. The receptionist ushered me in. I stood still for a moment to scrutinize my surroundings and acquit myself with the general ambiance of this new environment.

Around the hall were glass cupboards each archiving a three dimensional miniature model of an ancient locomotive plus some descriptive literature about its history. I noticed that the history in the first cupboard was earlier compared to that in the second one so, I assumed a chronological order of the cupboards moving clockwise around the hall- and I was right. As I went cupboard to adjacent cupboard, year to adjacent year, I condensed the development of railway transport in Kenya in just minutes of a theoretical countenance.

I saw pictures of inhuman colonialists whipping Kenyans into severe servitude to lay down the railway line early in the twentieth century. I saw how the earliest locomotives looked like and how they were propelled. I saw the earliest bosses of the corporation and the political changes in the corporation after Kenya became an independent republic.

I heard a loud siren. It was exactly five o'clock- end of visitors' time. The siren was not from a gadget inside the museum however but from a passenger train that had just arrived at the railway station near the museum. All in all, it was time for me to leave and as I compared that train at the railway station with what was shelved inside the glass cupboards, I concluded that railway transport in Kenya has not changed much overtime. On the "remarks" section of the visitors' book, I just drew a smiley!