The Standard Gauge Railway will be unveiled in June and these two ladies will be the first drivers(photos)

If everything is to go as the Jubilee administration promised, the Standard Gauge Railway is set to hit the ground running by June this year and two women are set to be in the forefront of this commissioning.

They are Wendy Kathambi 26 and Alice Mugure 27 who will be designated for the new locomotives which are set to enhance Kenya’s transportation.

The two ladies are products of China’s Baoji Railway Technical College where they enrolled into the rigorous SGR training programme which taught quite a lot of things including light Diesel locomotive maintenance.

And how they landed in this profession was quite interesting as none of them ever anticipated it.

Wendy was for example an electrical engineer but opted for the program when it started a decision she doesn’t regret at all. As for Alice, she studied Chinese and landed a job as a translator at Railway training institute and that’s when the opportunity to join the SGR presented itself; she embraced it with both hands.

The two were part of the inaugural test drive in March that saw them drive passengers from Nairobi to Sultan Hamud and back, a 105 KM stretch.

Here is a photo of the two doing their thing: