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
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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
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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
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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
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Signal box and switch yard
The original 1897 Bulawayo station signal box is preserved intact — levers, instruments and timetables unchanged from colonial times
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Bulawayo Station Historic Building
The 1960 station building replaced the Victorian original but still operates trains on the Harare to Victoria Falls line
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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