Zambia Railways resumed control. International links There are no current international passenger services of the ZR, only of the TAZARA railway. Some tour companies have run special services on the ZR network. Democratic Republic of the Congo The Copperbelt reaches into the Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo with mines at Lubumbashi and further north-west. The ZR network connects to Lubumbashi via Ndola and Sakania. At one time the Lubumbashi line connected to the Benguela Railway through Angola to Lobito Bay, but the line did not operate from the 1970s, until reopening in 2018. TAZARA Railway As most of its major export routes ran through then apartheid controlled South Africa, Zambia needed an alternate export route for its copper. In 1976, Chinese construction crews completed the 1,860-kilometer-long Tanzania-Zambia Railway (TAZARA) which runs from Kapiri Mposhi just north of the Zambian capital Lusaka, to the Tanzanian capital and major east African port of Dar es Salaam. After being operated jointly by the two nationalised railway systems, the Chinese again took over the running of TAZARA in a joint transport agreement from January 2007, which covered both direct air links to Beijing Capital International Airport and copper ore export. Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa Via Victoria Falls Bridge the Zimbabwe rail network and the ports in Mozambique (Beira, Maputo) and the South African Railways of South Africa can be reached. The condition of the 100-year-old bridge restricts traffic. Up to the mid-1960s, passenger and sleeper services ran from Ndola to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), connecting with a sleeper service to Cape Town and the Union Castle shipping line to Southampton, UK. This was the main travel route between south-central Africa and Europe before the Jet age. The journey from Ndola to Cape Town took five days. Ndola-Bulawayo passenger services ended when Zambia suspended all services across the Victoria Falls Bridge in response to Rhodesia's UDI crisis. Freight services were occasionally resumed up to the line re-opening in 1980, but successful passenger services have not resumed. Mozambique and Malawi A rail link to the Sena railway between Mozambique, Malawi and Zambia, allowing access to the port of Nacala, was first planned in 1982. On the Malawi side of the border, the line to Mchinji was finished in 1984, but a connection to Chipata in Zambia was only opened in 2010. This line remains idle because there are few facilities at