Lobito rail resumes Congo copper shipments after flood repairs

Lobito Atlantic Railway has received its first copper shipment from the Democratic Republic of Congo since restoring a flood-damaged section of track, resuming traffic on a critical minerals export route that had been closed for around two months.

The Lobito-Huambo link reopened following emergency repairs after severe flooding severed the corridor in April, cutting track near the Halo and Cavaco rivers south-east of Benguela. During the closure, LAR maintained some cargo flows by transferring freight between trains and trucks on either side of the damaged section, an improvised fix that kept a trickle of minerals moving while full repairs were completed.

'The resilience of our operation'

"The arrival of this first international train from the DRC demonstrates the resilience of our operation and the extraordinary commitment of our teams," chief executive Nicholas Fournier said. The corridor connects the Congolese copper and cobalt belt to the Angolan Atlantic port of Lobito and forms a central element of Western-backed efforts to build transport infrastructure for critical minerals exports from central Africa.

Proving the concept under stress

The full reopening mattered well beyond the immediate resumption of cargo volumes. For a corridor still trying to establish itself as a credible long-term alternative to more established southern African export routes, successfully working through a two-month closure — without losing customers back to road or rail links through Zambia and South Africa — was itself a form of proof of concept. The episode also underlined the corridor's continued exposure to Angola's seasonal flooding, a risk that would need to be engineered around, rather than assumed away, if the route was to attract the scale of long-term mining investment its backers in Washington and Brussels were hoping for. Within weeks, the corridor would post further gains, as fresh funding was announced to expand its capacity and Congolese miners resumed routing growing volumes of copper and cobalt along the line.

Sources

• Miningmx: Lobito rail resumes copper runs from Congo, 15 Jun 2026

Photo: A railway station on the Benguela line, part of the Lobito Corridor linking DRC copper mines to the Atlantic coast. David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.