In an article draft for the Belt and Road Institute in Sweden, Hussein Askary of EIR reported that he has confirmed with senior officials of the Egyptian Ministry of Transportation, that the building of an East-West high-speed railroad across Egypt has been contracted. This will be only the second electrified, high-speed railroad in Africa, and longer than the one in Morocco, serving a larger population. Askary’s article will be on the subject of “The African Infrastructure Renaissance along the Belt and Road — Case Study: Egypt.”
He writes that in September, specialized railway websites (https://railbus.com.ng/index.php/home/egypt-to-build-high-speed-rail/) reported that a consortium of the state-owned enterprise China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) and Egyptian companies Samcrete and the Arab Organization for Industrialization had won a $9 billion contract to build a 543 km-long high-speed railway in Egypt. The line would link the Mediterranean coast at El-Alamein to the Red Sea at Ain Sokhna, at up to 250 km/h speed, cutting the journey to three hours. “This is an unprecedented project in the history of Egypt connecting the east of the country to the west,” Askary writes, “rather than following the traditional centers along the Nile (south/north). This is a major sign of the shift the current industrial and infrastructure revolution is creating in the demographics of the nation of 100 million people. The horizontal expansion of the population and its economic activities centers … is completely intertwined with the development projects defined by the current government.