{"id":33528,"date":"2019-02-28T03:22:55","date_gmt":"2019-02-28T03:22:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=33528"},"modified":"2019-02-28T03:22:55","modified_gmt":"2019-02-28T03:22:55","slug":"oic-foreign-ministers-to-map-out-islamic-road-to-prosperity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=33528","title":{"rendered":"OIC foreign ministers to map\u00a0out Islamic road to prosperity"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nCAIRO: The train accident in Cairo\u2019s Ramses Station on Wednesday is just the latest in a long list of major railway disasters in Egypt that have caused hundreds of\u00a0 deaths in recent decades.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nAnd while the cause of the most recent accident remains uncertain, people at the site of the crash appeared to be frustrated at the government\u2019s failure to revamp the railway network.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cIs my fate to die (on the tracks)? It happens all the time … what do the authorities do?\u201d asked a man travelling from the Upper Egyptian province of Minya.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"His comments speak to a larger frustration.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nEgyptians have long complained that the government has failed to deal with chronic transport problems in the country, where roads are as poorly maintained as railway lines, and fatal train accidents are a common occurrence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nFigures from the official statistics agency show that there were 1,657 train accidents in 2017, up from 1,249 in 2016.<\/p>\n

\nTrains are a vital component of the average Egyptian\u2019s transportation, with 1.4 million passengers traveling by rail every day. The country\u2019s railway lines stretch over 9,570 km through 705 passenger stations.<\/p>\n

\nEgypt was the second country in the world after England to introduce the railway, and the first to do so in Africa and the Middle East.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nConstruction began on July 12, 1851, with a line between Alexandria and Kafr Eassa beginning operations in 1854. Cairo\u2019s Railway Museum, which opened near the Ramses Station in 1933 and was revamped in 2017, tells the story of this proud history.<\/p>\n

\nSo what went wrong with the region\u2019s oldest rail system? Officials often blame the network\u2019s poor maintenance on decades of negligence and a lack of funds.<\/p>\n

\nMajor train accidents date back to at least the 1990s. For instance, in December 1995, 75 people were killed when a train crashed into the back of another train.<\/p>\n

\nThe worst accident in Egypt\u2019s history happened in February 2002 in El-Ayyat, 70 km south of Cairo, when a train traveling from Cairo to Luxor caught fire and travelled for 9 km before it was halted. While the death toll was placed at 383, some say it could have run as high as 1,000.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\nThe last major incident occurred in August 2017, when two passenger trains collided near Egypt\u2019s Mediterranean city of Alexandria, killing more than 40 people and injuring scores.<\/p>\n

\nEgyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has called for a revamp of the national rail system, and during the past four years, the state has made various renovations to the railway lines, costing more than 300 million Egyptian pounds ($17 million).\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nLast year, Egypt signed a deal for new passenger coaches worth $1.14 billion with a Russian-Hungarian consortium; the previous year it signed a $575-million deal with General Electric to buy 100 locomotives.<\/p>\n

\nAfter Wednesday\u2019s accident, the government was quick to respond. El-Sisi called on his government to carry out an investigation and to hold those responsible accountable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CAIRO: The train accident in Cairo\u2019s Ramses Station on Wednesday is just the latest in a long list of major railway disasters in Egypt that have caused hundreds of\u00a0 deaths in recent decades.\u00a0 And while the cause of the most recent accident remains uncertain, people at the site of the crash appeared to be frustrated…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":33529,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33528\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/33529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}