Parliamentarians unsatisfied with condition of railways

CAIRO – 12 July 2017: The Ministry of Transportation has put a plan to develop and renovate the railway network in Egypt to be able to meet citizens’ needs for the facility and to stop the losses it has been sustaining for two decades.

The plan involves renovating 178,584 km of railroads during fiscal year 2016-2017 already completed, 168 km of railroads in fiscal year 2017-2018 and 1,200 km of railroad in fiscal year 2018-2019.

Developing the railway network needs over 45 billion EGP ($2.5 billion), since it has not been developed for 70 years, while the population has increased by about 10 times, Transport Minister Hisham Arafat disclosed in May.

“The railway system needs 700 new cars which will cost 7.6 billion EGP, and 200 engines which will cost 12 billion EGP,” the minister said in televised statements.

“The alternative way to develop the railway system without increasing the ticket price is to increase the transport of goods, which will provide the Egyptian national railway system with 300 million EGP,” Arafat said.

Parliamentarian Nabil Abou Basha, a member of the transportation committee, told Egypt Today that railways were not developed in the past years because of negligence, confusion and corruption.

Parliamentarian Mohamed Badawi Dessouki, another member of the transportation committee, told Egypt Today that the railway’s losses started in 1998, reached LE 43 billion last year and are expected to rise by five billion in the fiscal year 2017-2018 with no radical solutions proposed by the government.

These losses are usually covered by the state budget, which is considered a waste of resources. Thus, the railways in Egypt should be treated as an economic establishment generating profits rather than a service facility.

Dessouki noted that the services in that sector have deteriorated and that the railroads, stations and stores were not any better. The overall governing system must be restructured and developed, Dessouki stresses.

The Deputy President of the Transportation Committee Mohamed Abdallah Zain El Din said that the ministry keeps announcing plans and getting loans without revealing the outcomes of previous ones.

Zain El Din stated that the National Railways Authority borrowed $270 million in 2009 from the World Bank and signed an agreement with the Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development to receive 44 million KWD for the project for railway line signals electrification, but no tangible results have been achieved.