egyptian railways

My dear friend,

When C. suggested taking the train to Alexandria, I balked. “I promised my mother,” I told him, “that I would stay away from trains in Egypt.”

I’m not certain where she read about the accidents, but my mother was well informed about the perils of Egyptian railways. Earlier this year, when a train from Luxor to Alexandria made an unexplained stop on the tracks, it was struck from behind by another train. Shortly before that, a train from Cairo to Mansoura derailed. These deadly catastrophes are often attributed to structural issues such as very old train cars, outdated equipment, and a lack of financial investment and state support.

Yet the World Bank suggests that the problems with the Egyptian National Railway lie less in infrastructure and more in “people’s behavior” such as “poor supervision and safety enforcement on illegal crossings, robbery of assets, misallocation of maintenance funds, and poor training… There is also an inherited culture of misuse of public property such as stealing railway tracks, throwing garbage on the tracks and establishing markets on level crossings, as well as trespassing on the tracks.”

(Whatever the source, it’s worth noting that the problems plaguing Egyptian railways do not extend to other systems such as the Cairo Metro. Subway cars are clean and well-maintained, and so far have avoided the kinds of catastrophes that have stricken their cousins on tracks above ground.)

In any case, to hire a car instead of riding the train was not only environmentally unsound—it was also far more expensive. And, as C. persuasively pointed out, our experience with Egyptian drivers does not make us feel as though we’d be all that much safer on the highway. So we packed our bags, called a cab to the beating heart of downtown, and were swept toward the station entrance among a thundering crush of Cairenes. We couldn’t have turned back if we’d wanted to.

Once inside, a white-uniformed officer gestured for our tickets, scanned our destination, and took off toward the tracks. We assumed that we should follow. While we trotted to keep up, he strode along the length of the train without a word or a backward glance. He halted suddenly at the door to our car, climbed aboard to point out our seats, and then spun on his heel and disappeared before we could thank him or tip him. The bewildered Americans were safely deposited in the proper row. His job was done.

Designed by a British engineer, the Egyptian railway system was the first in Africa and the first in the Ottoman Empire. The British, seeking a swifter trade route through the Middle East to India—as well as greater political leverage in Egypt itself—negotiated a railway plan with Muhammad Ali Pasha, the founder of modern Egypt. Muhammad Ali’s economic, bureaucratic, and military reforms were intended to prepare Egypt for political independence from the Ottoman Empire, which is likely why he agreed to the British plan in 1834. However, by the time supplies for the new railway had arrived at the port of Alexandria, Muhammad Ali had changed his mind (perhaps because he understood that relying on European capital and enabling such easy European access to the country would work against the independent Egypt he envisioned). It wasn’t until 1854, five years after Mohammad Ali’s death, that the British succeeded in launching the first line of the national railway.

We settled into our seats and peered through filmy windows. Our masks helped ameliorate the faint tinge of urine radiating from the floors. Vendors flitted up and down the narrow aisle, selling magazines and water bottles. With just a few minutes remaining until our departure, I ventured back into the station in search of strong black tea.

In the architecture of the stations—the vaulted ceilings, the great stone pillars, the marble floors, the gleaming skylights—European and Ottoman aesthetics mingle. The central station in Cairo, called variously Ramses or Misr Station, features a piece of art that looks something like a railroad spike descending toward a pyramid.

This space has a few claims to fame: it was the setting for the 1958 Egyptian drama Cairo Station, as well as the place where famous Egyptian feminist Huda Sha'rawi symbolically removed her veil in 1923 after returning home from an international women’s conference in Rome.

In one particularly infamous incident in 2019, a train at Cairo Station struck a barrier, caught on fire, and killed at least 25 people. The train was unmanned because its conductor had left his post to fight with the conductor of a different train. In the words of the taxi driver who saw our shock when we passed two men loudly fighting in the middle of an Alexandrian street: “This is normal.”

On the two-and-a-half hour journey from Cairo to Alexandria, I found myself fretting a little about the likelihood of a fiery crash on the rails. (And I vowed to myself, not for the first time, to purchase additional traveler’s insurance if I reached my destination safely.)

But I also gazed out the window at donkeys hauling brush through irrigated fields, and I watched the clear sky unfurl over sand-colored villages, and I admired the strings of brightly-colored laundry trembling like symbols of something I couldn’t quite grasp. I snacked on a package of broken crackers I’d tucked into my bag, and I read several chapters of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi: a perfect book, it turned out, for the haunting seaside city we were clattering toward.

As is often the case, what I (and my mother along with me) feared most did not come to pass. The train arrived safely, and within half an hour of our arrival, we were admiring a golden corniche that curved along an aquamarine sea.

It strikes me now that although I spend much of my life trying to peer into the future, assessing risks in order to better prepare myself for some inevitable doom, the real peril usually arrives in a form I didn’t expect. I obsessed over the danger of the train, but the most terrifying experience occurred after we had safely disembarked in Cairo Station and were crossing a multi-lane highway on foot in the dark to catch a ride back to the apartment. At one point, when we were in the middle of the roadway and I looked left to see a car barreling toward us with no signs of slowing, I found myself thinking with a surprising serenity: “So this is my fate!”

Since I’m teaching Antigone online this week (a wonderful play to read, by the way, when wandering through a Grecian city like Alexandria), I’ve been thinking about all of the ways we try to outwit the universe and seize control of our own destinies. What Cairo reminds me time and again is that the future is as easy to predict as the movement of cars on an Egyptian highway in the dark.

Then reflect, my son, says the blind seer Tiresias to the new king Creon, who was standing on his own metaphorical curb outside his own metaphorical train station: you are poised, once more, on the razor-edge of fate.

We reached the far side with pounding hearts and all our limbs intact. Somehow, despite its structural failures, its lack of financial resources, its lawless roadways and its rickety railways, Egypt bore us safely away and home again.

Yours—L.

A Roman amphitheater in Alexandria where one might have come to see Antigone performed!