As East Africa's foremost railway hub, New Frankfurt City's importance went without saying. Of course, in a country as vast as East Africa, there could not possibly be only one railway hub.
Under East Africa's "three vertical and three horizontal" plan, these six trunk railways should have formed nine intersections as they crisscrossed one another. However, because the West Coast Railway could not yet cross the Namib Desert, Walvis Bay Port could not become a railway hub.
The objective reason for this was that the Namib Desert was a shifting desert. Even in the twentieth century, only a handful of countries had been capable of building roads and railways in such regions.
Maintenance was also difficult, and railways could easily be buried by windblown sand. Either supporting sand-control projects had to be carried out along the route, or elevated railways had to be built as the Far East Empire did in the twenty-first century, reducing erosion and burial by sandstorms.
Neither option was something East Africa could easily achieve at present, and even if it could, they would be extremely uneconomical.
Thus, in reality, the three vertical and three horizontal routes had only eight intersections. These eight points were also the railway hubs along East Africa's six most important trunk lines.
There were three national-level railway hubs in the central region: Kisangani City, New Frankfurt City, and Bulawayo city.
In fact, when branch railways were included, Harare, Lubumbashi, Dodoma, and others were also regional railway hubs. However, East Africa was currently focused mainly on trunk railway construction, and branch lines would only be built ahead of trunk lines if they possessed immense value, like the Habe Railway.
Mbeya city was East Africa's center of science and technology, which came as quite a surprise. After all, East Africa's higher education