Office National des Transports (Congo)

The National Office of Transport (French: Office National des Transports, or ONATRA) is a publicly owned company based in Kinshasa which operates railways, ports, and river transport in the north and west of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the Congo River. It is the continuation of the Office of Colonial Transport (Office des transports coloniaux, OTRACO) founded in 1935 and has subsequently existed under other names.

ONATRA head office

History

The 'Office des transports coloniaux (or "Colonial transport agency, OTRACO) was established, in 1935, as a public body, and renamed the Office des transports au Congo (OTRACO) in 1960, finally becoming the "Office National des Transports" (ONATRA) in 1971.

In 1973, ONATRA carried its largest number of passengers ever, a total of 410,871.

In 1977, the government decided to end ONATRA's monopoly of river transport, and to allow any individual or company to own and operate river boats.

Decline in the state of its assets, together with competition, led to a sharp decline, so that by 1982, it only carried 121,779 passengers.

Network
First Class ticket for the ferry Kalamu, November 2003

The network includes:

  • Matadi-Kinshasa Railway, under an agreement with the Congo Railroad Company ;
  • Rivers and lakes network
    • From Boma to Banana (ferry Kalamu) ;
    • River Congo and Kasai River (and their tributaries) ;
  • Ports

Timeline

2008
  • New locomotives
gollark: Personally, my suggested climate-change-handling policies:- massively scale up nuclear fission power, it's just great in most ways- invest in better rail infrastructure - maglevs are extremely cool™ and fast™ and could maybe partly replace planes?- electric cars could be rented from a local "pool" for intra-city transport, which would save a lot of cost on batteries- increase grid interconnectivity so renewables might be less spotty- impose taxes on particularly badly polluting things- do research into geoengineering things which can keep the temperature from going up as much- increase standards for reparability; we lose so many resources to randomly throwing stuff away because they're designed with planned obsolecence- a very specific thing related to that bit above there - PoE/other low-voltage power grids in homes, since centralizing all the AC→DC conversion circuitry could improve efficiency, lower costs of end-user devices, and make LED lightbulbs less likely to fail (currently some of them include dirt-cheap PSUs which have all *kinds* of problems)
gollark: You can get AR-ish things which just display notifications or something.
gollark: You can get limited AR glasses (nice ones you may want to actually wear as everyday ones) now, but it's expensive and not popular.
gollark: Yes, that might be interesting.
gollark: Probably more extreme weather and floods.

See also

References
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