Why Has Egypt’s Railway Development Not Reduced Accidents?

Despite billions of dollars in loans for railway development, Egypt’s accident rate remains high, with over 3,500 deaths and 5,500 injuries recorded from 2009 to 2024
Picture of Shimaa Hamdy

Shimaa Hamdy

The development projects for Egypt’s railways, which have been announced repeatedly and allocated billions of dollars from government loans and grants, have not led to a reduction in train accidents or improvements in performance and safety.

Only a few hours separated the inauguration of the Egypt Southern Railway Station by President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi in the Bashael area of Giza within the Greater Cairo region and a collision between sleeper train No. 1087 and a tractor near Maqusa village in Minya – one of the Upper Egypt governorates – early yesterday morning, Sunday. The accident resulted in two fatalities, including a conscript, and injured 22 others at the time of this writing. Following the incident, Public Prosecutor Mohamed Shawky Ayad issued an order to detain the tractor driver for questioning and examination to determine if he was under the influence of drugs.

This accident followed a similar one about a month earlier; in mid-September, four citizens were killed, and 49 others were injured due to a train collision in Zagazig, Sharqia Governorate, one of the Delta governorates. Despite the development initiatives announced by the Cairo government, Egyptian railway accidents have once again captured public attention.

The Zagazig train collision occurred less than two months after the Egyptian House of Representatives, in its session on June 25, 2024, approved Presidential Decree No. 471 of 2023 regarding the approval of a €250 million loan agreement from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to develop the Alexandria-Abu Qir railway line and convert it into an electric metro. This was published in the Official Gazette on Thursday, August 29.

Over the years, successive Egyptian governments have announced their work to develop Egypt’s railways, which have seen thousands of accidents, some described as catastrophic. This is what the current government, led by Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly, relies on to continue borrowing.

This investigation assumes that the repeated announcements of development projects for Egypt’s railways, for which the Egyptian government has allocated billions of dollars in loans and grants, have not reduced the rate of train accidents or improved performance and safety. On the contrary, fatal accidents persist, and human and material losses continue to mount, raising questions about the effectiveness of these upgrades and how the loans are being spent.

The statistics used in this investigation were gathered from the periodic annual bulletins of the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) and the “Egypt in Figures” booklet recently issued by CAPMAS, covering the period from 2009 to 2023. Through research and scrutiny, disparities and differences in train accident statistics for 2018 and beyond were noted, which are the years when Kamel Al-Wazir took office as Minister of Transportation. For example, the 2019 CAPMAS annual bulletin, issued in 2020, recorded 2,044 train accidents in 2018. However, this figure was reduced to 1,107 incidents in the 2023 “Egypt in Figures” booklet published last June. Similarly, the number of train accidents in 2019 was lowered from 1,863 in the annual bulletin to 1,442 incidents in the statistical booklet.

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Development Without Reducing Accidents
On October 27, 2009, Mohamed Mansour, then Egyptian Minister of Transport, submitted his resignation, which was immediately accepted by former President Hosni Mubarak after a train collision in the Al-Ayyat area south of Cairo. The accident left 18 dead and 36 injured after harsh criticism was directed at the minister by the Egyptian Parliament, holding him accountable for the accident during a meeting of the People’s Assembly Transport Committee in which the causes of the accident were discussed.

The accident occurred seven years after another incident in Al-Ayyat in 2002, which became known in the media as the Upper Egypt Train Disaster after a train carrying citizens who had hoped to spend Eid al-Adha with their families in Upper Egypt became a mass grave for more than 350 passengers. Seven passenger cars, crowded with people heading from Cairo to Luxor, burned. The catastrophe was exacerbated by the fact that the driver did not stop until the seven cars had burned completely near Al-Ayyat, after which he detached the remaining nine cars and continued his journey to Asyut.

Between the 2002 and 2009 Al-Ayyat accidents, many other train accidents occurred, most notably a train collision in Qalyub, north of Cairo, in 2006, which killed 58 and injured dozens. Afterward, the Cairo government announced the allocation of EGP 5 billion to develop the railway system.

Since the era of the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser and the current President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, approximately six plans and projects for developing and modernizing Egypt’s railway system have been announced. We tracked three of these in this investigation, yet the bloodshed on the tracks has not stopped. From 2009 to 2023, more than 16,000 train accidents occurred at an average of 0.1 incidents per 10,000 population, with train collision rates declining between 2011 and 2012 before rising again.

The Number of Accidents

The Number of Accidents

According to the data, 2016 saw the highest rate of accidents per population. However, the rate decreased between 2019 and 2021 before rising again.

The authorities usually attribute responsibility for train accidents to human factors, such as drivers and track workers. This was noted by Kamel Al-Wazir, Deputy Prime Minister for Industrial Development and Minister of Industry and Transport, while following up on the train collision in Sharqia before the Public Prosecution concluded its investigations. He stated that human error caused the accident, although the Public Prosecution was responsible for determining the incident’s cause. He clarified that the train had departed from Zagazig station and stopped on the track of another train, affirming, “We are working on developing the system.”

According to an analysis of official data from 2009 to 2019, the primary cause of train accidents was trains colliding with level crossing gates, followed by derailments and other types of falls. Overrunning platforms and exceeding semaphore (signal) limits accounted for much smaller percentages.

Adel Adly, a contracted railway driver of five years, says that responsibility is always laid on the drivers and railway workers, describing it as an evasion of searching for the real causes of the crises and addressing them. He adds, “Despite the development, the authority continues to suffer from traditional thinking and poor organization.”

He continues, “For example, the authority has worked on training drivers, monitoring them, and conducting medical check-ups, in addition to developing signaling systems and focusing on installing light signals. However, old signals remained in place alongside the new ones, which confuses some drivers.” He notes that human error is always possible.

In a statement issued last July, the Ministry of Transport outlined a comprehensive plan to develop railway system elements from 2014 to 2024, with a cost of EGP 225 billion. It focused on five main pillars, including the development of rolling stock, infrastructure, signaling systems, production workshops, and human resource development, aiming to increase transport capacity and maximize passenger and freight transport on network lines.

In November 2015, Dr. Ibrahim El-Demery, then Minister of Transport, instructed the then-chairman of the Railway Authority to establish a new plan for restructuring the railways, revising the old plan from 2006, which had begun implementation in mid-2007, and reconsidering the status of companies owned by the authority established under the old plan.

In 2006, the Ministry of Transport tasked the American consultancy firm Booz Allen with preparing a plan to develop and restructure the railway, which led to the division of the authority into seven companies responsible for its activities. This plan aimed to control and manage the authority’s employees, which at the time exceeded 70,000, as well as to make optimal use of the authority’s resources, assets, and properties. Eight years after the implementation of the development plan, the Ministry of Transport decided to halt it, as the authority’s profits over those eight years amounted to only EGP 30 million, a significant loss for the authority.

In September 2014, a new attempt at development began at the Egyptian Euromoney Conference, where Egyptian railway officials announced a $10 billion investment over ten years to modernize and maintain the old railway network, with $2.2 billion from the World Bank. This plan aimed to upgrade rolling stock and railway infrastructure, as well as provide training and knowledge transfer. However, just five years after the development plan began, a massive fire broke out at Ramses Station in Cairo, killing 20 and injuring more than 40, according to then Minister of Health Hala Zayed. Following the accident, then Minister of Transport Hisham Arafat resigned from his position one year after assuming office. Later that year, Kamel Al-Wazir, former head of the Egyptian Armed Forces Engineering Authority, took over the Ministry of Transport, where he remains to date.

Loans for Development
From 2009 to 2023, the Cairo government obtained several loans under the banner of developing the Egyptian Railways Authority. In August 2009, the World Bank approved a $270 million loan to the railway authority as part of a national plan established by the government to restructure the authority, aiming to upgrade signals, install a central control system on the Cairo–Arab al-Raml–Alexandria line, renew 200 kilometers of rails on the Cairo–Aswan line, and upgrade the Benha–Port Said line. The loan amount increased in September 2011 to $600 million, after approval of an additional $330 million loan, to develop signal systems and install a central control system for the Beni Suef–Asyut section, which is part of the Cairo–Aswan line. Since 2009 until this year, 2024, Egypt has borrowed billions of dollars to develop the railway authority.

The most recent of these loans was €200 million from the Spanish company Talgo for the supply of seven sleeper trains to the Egyptian Railways Authority. This loan was objected to by the Justice Party MP Abdel Moneim Emam during the June 3 session of the House of Representatives, which discussed the loan agreement between Egypt and Spain. He asserted, “Debt and the current crisis are 80% Kamel Al-Wazir’s responsibility.”

Despite billions of dollars in foreign loans obtained by Egyptian Railways, as well as domestic loans and grants, bloodshed on the tracks continues. From 2009 to 2024, these accidents have claimed more than 3,500 lives and injured around 5,500 others, according to annual bulletins from CAPMAS.

In 2016, a turning point occurred, with fatalities in 2017 quadrupling from 2016, and injuries also increasing.

In a World Bank report on the Egyptian Railway Development Project published on September 23, 2020, it was explained that the antiquity and deterioration of railway infrastructure and the weakness of safety and security culture lead to repeated train accidents and delays. There is insufficient data on the number of fatalities or severe injuries, and many accidents go unreported. Egypt experiences approximately a thousand train collisions annually. Other safety and security statistics reveal that Egypt experiences about five times the number of serious accidents as European railways, about seven times that of the United Kingdom, and twenty times that of Japan.

Zawia3 reached out to Magid Farag, the official spokesperson for the Egyptian Railways Authority, who refused to comment on the reasons for the high accident rate despite the development plan. He stated, “We cannot issue data without official approval from the relevant sectors, through a formal request to the commander responsible for compiling the required data.”

The spokesperson commented on CAPMAS statistics: “We are not responsible for those statistics. They do not concern the authority, and we do not know their source or basis; they do not apply to us, and we do not know whether they are realistic or fictional. The authority’s numbers are released by the chairman after approval.”

For his part, labor and human rights lawyer Yasser Saad expressed disapproval at the railway spokesperson’s refusal to address our questions about the rising train accident rate despite the “alleged development,” noting that his refusal reflects the state of Egypt’s administrative apparatus and its control by security agencies. As a result, key and strategic state positions are assigned to individuals who are not concerned with community development, research, or even information disclosure, despite the constitutional right to access and share information.

In his conversation with us, he clarified that all official data related to the state is owned by the Egyptian people. He noted that journalism’s role is to publish official data from official sources in addition to fact-checking. Therefore, when an official withholds information or has different information from what is being circulated and does not publish it, it is considered a failure to fulfill their duty and an obstruction of information to the people. He warned, “There is no legal punishment for this at present.”

Regarding the disparity in numbers in the annual bulletins and the CAPMAS “Egypt in Figures” booklet, he sees this as part of the state’s approach to dealing with crises, from the perspective of ignoring or hiding them rather than confronting and addressing them.

Article 68 of the amended Egyptian Constitution of 2019 states that “Information, data, statistics, and official documents are the property of the people, and the state guarantees access to them from their various sources for every citizen, and it is obligated to provide and make them available to citizens transparently. The law regulates the rules for obtaining, providing, and protecting the confidentiality of these records, as well as the rules for depositing and preserving them, submitting appeals for refusals to provide them, and defining penalties for deliberately withholding information or providing false information. State institutions must deposit official documents in the national archive after the completion of their use period, and protect, secure, restore, and digitize them with all modern means and tools, according to the law.”

Loans Devour Development Manifestations

In recent years, debt servicing has outweighed actual spending on developing the Egyptian Railways Authority. According to official data, investment uses in the final account of the authority’s budget for the fiscal year 2020/2021 declined. The proportion of investment transfers (debt service) has remained predominant, while the share of raw materials and spare parts has declined in the final account for the fiscal year 2021/2022.

Osama Aqeel, a professor of transport engineering at Ain Shams University, believes the railway is not benefiting from the billions received in loans. He elaborated, “We have two types of railways: one used by the public and the other funded by the government, such as high-speed and electric trains.”

He clarified in his conversation with Zawia3 that the railways used by the public have not been developed and have not received the claimed funding. The funding goes exclusively to the projects the government is recently working on, such as the high-speed train. There is no evidence that the loans the state receives are spent on developing the railway authority as a whole; it is limited to government projects only.

A report published by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights in 2019 noted that when the railway authority contracted with the World Bank in 2009 for rehabilitation, it chose to develop two lines of air-conditioned trains, which are used by the wealthier population. Then, the authority did not commit to any of the development clauses it had signed for almost ten years, despite receiving portions of the loan and even beginning to repay it.

Ashraf Raslan, then-chairman of the railway authority, revealed the authority’s negotiation with the Central Bank to write off its long-standing debts, both due to the annual shortfall carried forward and local debt interest. He noted that the accumulated debt exceeded EGP 70 billion. He explained that part of the debt originates from loans and loan interest borrowed from the National Investment Bank, stating, “There are historical loans from the 1990s with an original value of about EGP 10 billion, but due to delays in repayment, their interest far exceeded their original value. Thus, most of the authority’s debt is due to loan interest on loans taken many years ago.”

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High-Speed Train, an Additional Burden
Since 2014, the Railway Authority has announced the implementation of a comprehensive plan to develop its elements, focusing on five main pillars: developing rolling stock, infrastructure, signaling systems, production workshops, and human resource development to increase transport capacity, maximize passenger and freight transport on network lines, raise safety and security rates, and reduce carbon emissions caused by truck transportation.

In the same year, official documents revealed that the Ministry of Transport was seeking a €1 billion loan from a commercial bank in Hungary, with an interest rate ranging from 2.25% to 3.30%, to finance the purchase of 700 second-class carriages and 16 complete trains, despite a lack of technical study or inspection of the Hungarian factory that would manufacture these carriages. The Arab Organization for Industrialization has superior capabilities to the Hungarian factories in this field and could supply these carriages at much lower prices.

In January 2021, Siemens Global Mobility signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Egyptian Ministry of Transport to develop the country’s first electrically high-speed railway line. The initial request was estimated at EGP 360 billion. The first phase of the project will connect 460 kilometers of railways between El Alamein on the Mediterranean and Ain Sokhna on the Red Sea. This line will pass through the New Administrative Capital, under construction 45 kilometers east of Cairo, using high-speed trains that have not previously been used in Egypt.

The first line of the electric train is expected to be operational by the end of this year, 2024, from Ain Sokhna to Marsa Matruh, covering 660 kilometers at a speed of 230 kilometers/hour and passing through 22 stations. The second line is expected to be operational by the end of next year, 2025, from October Gardens in Giza to Abu Simbel in Aswan, Upper Egypt, covering 1,400 kilometers at a speed of 160 kilometers/hour, and passing through 35 stations.

Last February, the authority announced the modification and installation of some trains to upgraded Spanish and VIP carriages, effective March 1. The modifications affected air-conditioned trains of models 2008/2009/2010, which were changed to Spanish and VIP models. Earlier, in October 2014, Minister of Transport Hani Dahi terminated the work of the Italian expert team, explaining, “They provided no tangible contribution to the development plan, and their presence cost the authority EGP 50 million for personal services, including hotel bookings, private cars, health insurance, translators’ salaries, and school expenses for their children.”

Following repeated accidents, Freddy El-Bayadi, a member of Parliament and deputy head of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, filed a parliamentary question directed to both the Prime Minister and the Minister of Transport following the recent train accident in Zagazig. He questioned why the officials responsible for repeated train accidents, including the Minister of Transport for his political responsibility, had not been held accountable. He also inquired about the trillions borrowed by the Ministry of Transport under the pretext of developing the system, demanding an urgent response to these questions.

In response, Freddy confirmed to us that he had not yet received answers to his questions posed in Parliament. He said, “I have no answer to the questions raised about the change and development the Ministry of Transport claims to have achieved, based on which it obtained numerous loans. Where did the funds from these loans go? Or are there other priorities for spending them instead of automation and reducing dependence on human labor?”

He added, “After every train accident, the government claims development, automation, electronic alarms, and other advancements to make the system automated and safe. Yet, we have not seen this in practice, and after every accident, they often scapegoat the workers and drivers, while no senior official is held accountable. These accidents require holding responsible officials accountable, starting from the politically responsible minister to employees and workers if they are truly at fault. However, they only prosecute the workers and drivers to account for the mistakes of senior officials. If there is any suspicion of negligence or corruption, it should be announced, and the responsible officials should be held accountable.”

Egyptian Railways serves a large segment of the Egyptian population, transporting approximately 500 million passengers annually and moving freight at a rate of six million tons annually. Egypt owns the second-oldest railway system globally, with a total railway length of 9,570 kilometers, 705 passenger stations, 1,330 level crossings, 3,500 passenger carriages, 10,000 freight carriages, and 800 locomotives.

Shimaa Hamdy
An Egyptian journalist covering political and human rights issues with a focus on women's issues. A researcher in press freedom, media, and digital liberties.

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