Furthermore the railway could never have been built without the approval of the Emperor Yohannes which in Menelik’s opinion could never be obtained." 2 The King had once recognised that the project was some-what dangerous, that much had to be considered before it could be allowed to go forward and that it was therefore best to reject it. He remembered from his youth that in the fight against Theodore the English had made the task of pushing forward troops, munitions and provisions easier by building a small strategic railway from the coast. The King was not well disposed towards the idea. He tried to interest the King of Shoa in the project, prepared an attractive model with rails, locomotives and carriages, but met with but moderate approval. " The conception of the railway," writes llg’s biographer, Conrad Keller, " preoccupied him all the time. Traders at this time often took about six weeks on the journey which was almost inevitably accompanied by considerable stealing as it was very difficult adequately to supervise the muleteers. Having on that occasion taken no less than seven months to make the 700 kilometre journey from the coast to the then capital of Ankober he was fully aware of the inconvenience of mule transport, the high costs of which greatly hindered trade in low priced commodities, such as coffee, skins and wax, which constituted the bulk of Ethiopia’s exports. The idea of constructing a railway to link the Ethiopian capital with the coast appears to have been first conceived by Menelik’s Swiss adviser, Alfred Ilg, who had first arrived in Ethiopia in 1877.
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