A Railway Heritage Site Connected to Movement, Labour, and Memory.
Anchored by a preserved 1900s-era steam locomotive, Turi Station narrates the story of the Uganda Railway — the iron line that colonial administrators drove across East Africa at enormous human cost, and which fundamentally reshaped the landscape, economy, and population of what would become Kenya.
The railway brought settlers, soldiers, and administrators; it also brought tens of thousands of indentured labourers from South Asia, displaced indigenous communities from their lands, and opened the interior to an extractive economy that would define the colonial era. The locomotive here stands as evidence of all of it — the engineering ambition and the human toll that came with it.
Turi Station invites visitors to consider the railway not only as an infrastructure story but as a political one: who built it, who benefited, who was displaced, and how its legacy continues to run through Kenyan society more than a century later.
