For those who have never heard of it, it is a freight train that has been operating since the 1960s and connects the enormous iron mines of the city of Zouèrat, located deep in the Sahara, with the port of Nouadhibou, a town on the Atlantic coast in the north of Mauritania.
The iron train has an impressive quantity of wagons, around 200, and is between 2.5 km and 3 km long depending on the quantity of ore transported. It travels on a single track of 704 kilometers, with 200 – 300 freight carriages. It is an extremely important means of transport for the country's economy because the export of iron has become one of the fundamental pillars of the impoverished Mauritanian economy.
Iron train route
The iron train transports thousands of tons of iron every day from Zouèrat, about 700 km from the coast, where the iron mines are located, to Nouadhibou, the economic capital of the country, where the ore is unloaded and prepared to be shipped to different parts of the world. Usually, during the day, there are 6 trains in total, 3 traveling loaded from the mines to the coast, and 3 traveling unloaded to the mines.
Two of these, one in each direction, also stop for about ten minutes in Choum, a tiny village located between Atar and Zouérat, and have a couple of passenger carriages attached to allow people to move. These carriages are always packed with people and have a fairly high cost, therefore, most locals travel inside the freight carriages for hours and hours. The journey from Zouèrat to Choum takes approximately 5 hours (approximately 250 km), while between Choum and Nuadhibou it takes approximately 11 hours.
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