COMING as it did just few weeks following a saddening train derailment that killed six people in Qalyoub to the north of Cairo, the tragic collision on Saturday of a Cairo-bound train from Fayyoum and another one heading opposite should serve as a serious reminder of the grave human, economic and social losses if the so-called ‘railway bloodshed' is left as unstoppable as it has so far seemed. With a train mishap catching the news every now and then, the issue has doubtlessly exceeded the limits of interpretation as one of random or casual occurrence that could be understood and managed as part of the risks of modern life. Accidents of the sort have noticeably built and grown into a pattern, as so indicated by their frequency as well as by their geographical reach, having taken place in almost all directions of the national railway network. Equally lamentable is the almost patternised reaction of putting the blame on locomotive drivers and, to a more or less degree, on rail traffic signal operators. On their part, drivers and signal operators maintain that they are taken for scapegoats since the railway network continues to suffer from negligence and deteriorating technical conditions. In the case of the Qalyoub accident, the train driver, now in jail, has explicitly blamed the accident on technical grounds, citing, inter alia, malfunctioning speedometres – a complaint that looks widely shared by other locomotive drivers who have been interviewed in local press. It follows that even if the official account were to be taken seriously, the actual causation must by lying somewhere beyond drivers and signal operators. So it must be fetched and identified at the very heart of the railway system management. It is indeed a serious issue, given that Egypt is a country of some 85 million people who reside mainly along the banks of the River Nile and in its delta; i.e., in nearly 6% of the total area of Egypt. Under normal conditions, it should have been the case that railways and the Nile waterway be duly utilised and developed in such a manner as to turn them into the main bulk of the national transportation activity. Over decades, successive governments and a plethora of transportation policies, or the lack of them, have done only little to launch truly reliable and efficient railway and Nile transport services. The cumulative effect is simply and squarely what we find today – a noticeably unsafe railway system with no credible timetable, no decent seating, poor air-conditioning and difficult ticketing, as well as extremely slow and downsized Nile traffic. Reasons have all the time been cited as predominantly related to finances and lack of due technical support, in addition, of course, to the ‘accidental' aspect. While it would be unfair to demand a five-month-old government to resolve overnight a problem that has aggravated over decades, it is reasonable to expect the first government to serve under the nation's first freely elected administration to draw up an integrated policy to reform and modernise the entire transportation system with a view to ensuring its efficiency and maximised capacity for the foreseeable future. Such an approach could in fact be much fitter than engagement with administrative investigations into each of a seemingly endless spate of analogous mishaps.
