Whether it was a runaway train or simply a train to nowhere, no one can quite agree. But, for now at least, one thing is clear: a “lost” locomotive stranded for years in the middle of the Egyptian desert is finally back on track.
The yarn begins in 1996, when Egypt’s railway authorities opened a line to connect remote parts of the country’s Western Desert with a port on the eastern Red Sea coast. But the service was far from smooth, with the desert’s shifting sands often covering its tracks, making maintenance expensive. So the railway was forced to close.
According to al-Masry al-Youm (AMAY), a private Egyptian broadsheet, one of the railway’s trains disappeared soon thereafter. Metal thieves had seized the opportunity to steal hundreds of tons of railway tracks, leaving the train abandoned in the desert, its whereabouts forgotten. After eight years of reconnaissance, AMAY’s story continues, the runaway train has finally been found.
According to the government, the train may have been stranded on a railway without rails, but it was never lost. In 2006, the authorities tried to reunite the engine with the main network, Samir Nawar, president of Egypt’s railway, said. But that year there were severe mountain floods and, “because of the heavy rainfall in that area, the railway collapsed”, leaving the tracks and the plan adrift.
About 150 kilometres of track was then stolen by thieves, Nawar admitted. But the train itself was always under the watchful eye of the state – unable to move, but sitting safely in Kharga station on the far west of the line. An online video of an abandoned railway engine – seemingly filmed by disgruntled residents of the Western Desert, and uploaded as early as 2011 – appears to corroborate Nawar’s narrative.
But wherever the train ended up, there is greater clarity on the its new destination. According to the ministry, a private haulage company has won a £2m tender to lug the engine back to Cairo by lorry.A
