Egyptian Railway Sector
Old is not always gold
With an impressive past, troublesome present and a fearful future: Egyptian Railway is so much similar to Egypt nowadays, writes Ahmed Morsy
“I dream of a time when a train safely runs and reaches its destination on time,” said Islam Shokri, a 29-year-old employee living in Nasr City district of Cairo and working in Aswan. Shokri, whose work necessitates travelling about 900 kilometres by train every week, said that the trip from Cairo to Aswan sometimes takes fifteen hours instead of nine hours even if there were no strikes or sit-ins blocking the train’s rails.
The total time wasted due to the trains being suspended by strikes and sit-ins was 2,580 minutes within 350 days, which is equivalent to 108 days, the highest percentage of wasted time in the history of the railroads, according to a report issued by Egyptian Railway Authority (ERA).
“In addition to the lateness, it became risky to travel by train due to the increasing number of fatalities the national railways have been witnessing,” Shokri added.
Recently, the railways have seen an escalating number of accidents. At least 52 people - mainly of schoolchildren - were killed last week after a train collided with a school bus that drove through a railway crossing in Al-Mandara village in Assiut province, resulting in the Egyptian Transport Minister Mohammed Rashad Al-Metini and ERA Chairman Mustafa Qenawi to resign from their posts immediately following the crash. Over the last 20 years, thousands of Egyptians have been killed in train accidents as both the current and previous governments failed to implement the essential road safety in addition to negligence, aging equipment and lax enforcement of laws.
“The railway sector’s deterioration began in the fifties,” Osama Okail, Professor of Road Engineering at Ain Shams University, told Al-Ahram Weekly, adding that the traces of deterioration emerged in the era of the late President Gamal Abdel-Nasser, in which the focus was on the
With an impressive past, troublesome present and a fearful future: Egyptian Railway is so much similar to Egypt nowadays, writes Ahmed Morsy
“I dream of a time when a train safely runs and reaches its destination on time,” said Islam Shokri, a 29-year-old employee living in Nasr City district of Cairo and working in Aswan. Shokri, whose work necessitates travelling about 900 kilometres by train every week, said that the trip from Cairo to Aswan sometimes takes fifteen hours instead of nine hours even if there were no strikes or sit-ins blocking the train’s rails.
The total time wasted due to the trains being suspended by strikes and sit-ins was 2,580 minutes within 350 days, which is equivalent to 108 days, the highest percentage of wasted time in the history of the railroads, according to a report issued by Egyptian Railway Authority (ERA).
“In addition to the lateness, it became risky to travel by train due to the increasing number of fatalities the national railways have been witnessing,” Shokri added.
Recently, the railways have seen an escalating number of accidents. At least 52 people - mainly of schoolchildren - were killed last week after a train collided with a school bus that drove through a railway crossing in Al-Mandara village in Assiut province, resulting in the Egyptian Transport Minister Mohammed Rashad Al-Metini and ERA Chairman Mustafa Qenawi to resign from their posts immediately following the crash. Over the last 20 years, thousands of Egyptians have been killed in train accidents as both the current and previous governments failed to implement the essential road safety in addition to negligence, aging equipment and lax enforcement of laws.
“The railway sector’s deterioration began in the fifties,” Osama Okail, Professor of Road Engineering at Ain Shams University, told Al-Ahram Weekly, adding that the traces of deterioration emerged in the era of the late President Gamal Abdel-Nasser, in which the focus was on the