I've decided I want to model the Matadi-Kinshasa portage railway during the colonial era around 1900, when it was still a part of the Congo Free State. I've run into problems, however, finding almost any kind of good, solid documentations and/or pictures of the port area and the locomotives, aside from basically one very grainy photo.
Does anyone have any ideas or resources where I could find more information on the railway, the Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du Congo, or at least find some comparable information on other Central African railways?
Thanks in advance. I've always seen helpful advice given out here, so I hope you can help me out.
The period account I know exists is by railway engineer Louis Goffin, Le chemin de fer du Congo, in 1906 or 1907--there are several cites for different stretches of railway, including Matadi-Kinshasa. I've seen it once, but it's now been digitized, and this could include it on Google Books. Gallica turns up nothing, although the Bulletin de la Société Royale de Géographie d'Anvers has a nice discussion of Goffin's qualifications from 1908 available via Gallica (gallica.bnf.fr) if you search on his name and "le chemin de fer du congo" alone.
I'd start with Goffin, because he was involved in the administration of those lines, and would probably give the most reliable technical details about it for that era. It's definitely steeped in colonial language (and comes at the very tail end of Leopold's crimson-stained rule) but it is as close as you are likely to get to the era without going to Brussels. I do not know if the original maps and plans of the stations even still exist, or whether they were among the papers deliberately and wantonly destroyed in the effort to cover up the situation in the Free State before handover--but Goffin might give you a surprising amount of detail, thanks to the considerable pride the engineers took in the creation of those lines. He may leave some things out, too, of course, but it could be enough for the purposes of model-building. There are some photos there in the text, but I haven't looked closely at them. If some are useful, a physical copy of the book (if you can get a loan) would of course have much better reproductions.
I would suggest perhaps seeing if Gallica has any digitized photographs of the areas you seek, or other works in digital form about the Compagnie. I'm often surprised to find parts of German and British Africa among the holdings on offer, so Belgium is much more likely if such images are available anywhere outside of archives. That said, I am utterly unaware whether Belgium's government has embarked on any kind of systematic digitization project of that scale, so if anyone knows of one, please do chime in!
(edit: I am of course assuming that you have the ability to read French. If you do not, that complicates matters a lot, as more recent works of depth seem to be mostly if not entirely in the language.)