RouteBulawayo

Bulawayo's Railway Heritage & Steam Locomotive Museum

Explore Bulawayo's deep railway identity — the colonial hub that connected Cape Town to Cairo — through its extraordinary museum of working steam locomotives

Google Maps Apple Maps

1
Main hall of the Railway Museum
The country's best transport museum displays 17 locomotives from the 1890s to the 1950s including the famous Garratts that hauled coal from Hwange
2
Cecil Rhodes Funeral Engine
The actual locomotive that pulled Cecil Rhodes' funeral train from Cape Town to Bulawayo in 1902 has pride of place in the museum's collection
3
Working steam locomotives
On select weekends, the museum fires up a working steam locomotive for short rides along part of the original track behind the museum
4
Signal box and switch yard
The original 1897 Bulawayo station signal box is preserved intact — levers, instruments and timetables unchanged from colonial times
5
Bulawayo Station Historic Building
The 1960 station building replaced the Victorian original but still operates trains on the Harare to Victoria Falls line
6
African Sun Hotel Railway History
The former Cecil Hotel opposite the station was the terminal hotel where empire builders, adventurers and missionaries began their journeys north