Each morning sleepy travellers walk to the tracks and clamber aboard Zimbabwe’s only commuter train as it prepares to leave the Cowdray Park settlement at 6am and embark on its 12-mile (20km) journey into Bulawayo, the country’s second city.

Commuters queue to buy tickets as the sun rises over the Cowdray Park settlement

The popular service was revived in November after being suspended for 13 years. The rail network collapsed under President Robert Mugabe, who ruled for nearly four decades until he was ousted in 2017.

At Cowdray Park, there is no platform or station, only a makeshift ticket office made out of an old carriage sitting in a field. En route, the train stops several times to pick up more passengers who stream in from surrounding homes, climbing up the steps and squeezing into 14 packed carriages.

The Freedom train approaches a station in the early morning

Soon after 7am, the train pulls into Bulawayo’s grand but dilapidated station and disgorges about 2,000 workers, uniformed schoolchildren and other travellers into the city centre, ready for the day ahead.

“The prices for kombis (minibuses) went up to two dollars, and that’s just too expensive,” says Sipeka Mushoma, 61, a an HGV driver at a Bulawayo steel manufacturer, who managed to grab a rare early seat.

Panashe Chabwera, a student lecturer at a local college, waits next to the railway tracks

A boy waits for his ride to school

Passengers purchase tickets

“The train is 50 cents. My children have to get the kombi to go to school, but this saves me a lot of money to buy vegetables and bread. Zimbabweans are hurting badly, some of us are really starving now.” The government announced last month that fuel prices would more than double, triggering violent protests, a security crackdown and further pressure on minibuses to raise prices. Bulawayo once had two commuter train lines carrying workers in from either side of the city, while the capital, Harare, had three – all of them nicknamed Freedom trains as they enabled passengers to avoid higher road costs.

The train arrives and passengers jostle to board

The services were scrapped in about 2006, and the Cowdray Park line is the only one to be relaunched in a $2.5m (£1.9m) project funded by the state-owned National Railways of Zimbabwe. Mugabe’s successor, Emmerson Mnangagwa, has backed railway investment as part of his plans to revive the economy. But the outcome of the commuter train is a rare success in his efforts, which have struggled to produce results.

On board the Freedom train

“The president and new government are very supportive of the railways,” says Nyasha Maravanyika, the railways’ press relations chief, adding that talks were under way for an international consortium to fund a full-scale relaunch of the network.

A security officer conducts a routine ticket check

“We had to refurbish old carriages to get this service going, and it has been a huge success,” Maravanyika says. “The old commuter trains were suspended as the coaches and the signalling became more and more run down. People know that when they are on the train, they are on their way to work. It is an answer to their transport blues. We are here to attract commuters as kombi fares rise – that’s our job.”

The train approaches Bulawayo main station

Maravanyika says $10m would put the other four commuter lines back in operation. “We hope to reopen the other Bulawayo line next and, despite all the challenges, revive Zimbabwe‘s railways,” he says. “They were the heartbeat of the southern African rail network.”

Zimbabwe’s rail network – which includes the dramatic line across the Victoria Falls into Zambia – was built under British colonial rule, and at its peak in the 1990s had 600 locomotives and 3,000 passenger carriages. Today it has fewer than 100 locomotives and a few hundred carriages that run a threadbare schedule between the big cities, and a much-reduced freight service carrying sugar, chrome and quarried stone.

Schoolgirls plait their hair as they wait to board the train

Armed police officers stand guard at a checkpoint along the railway tracks; Nyasha Maravanyika at the main station in Bulawayo

The main line between Harare and Bulawayo, which opened in 1907, was once electrified, but vandalism stripped it of its copper cables, signalling system and track motors. Today diesel-powered trains on the line are often severely delayed and drivers are forced to communicate using text and WhatsApp messages, Maravanyika says.

A makeshift ticket office made out of an old carriage sits in a field near the Cowdray Park township

On the Bulawayo commuter train, some windows on older carriages are still marked “RR” for “Rhodesian Railways” – Zimbabwe’s name before independence in 1980.

Passengers buy tickets for the train to Cowdray Park

Passengers disembark at Bulawayo’s busy main station

Rattling along on her return journey home, Ashley Sinda, 40, is weary after a long day working as a cleaner at a pharmaceutical company. “I live 300 metres from the last stop, so it is easy for me,” says the mother of two, sitting among nurses, teachers, office workers staring at mobile phones and labourers drinking cheap local beer. “It is impossible to afford the kombis, even if they are faster,” she says. “I am glad about this train, it is a good thing for us.