re posted from EIR DAILY ALERT SERVICE
Chinese-Egyptian High-Speed ‘Suez Canal on Rails’ Connects Mediterranean and Red Sea
Sept. 17 (EIRNS)—China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) and Egyptian companies Samcrete and the Arab Organization for Industrialization have won a $9 billion contract to build a 543-km high-speed railway, connecting the Mediterranean coast at El-Alamein to the Red sea at Ain Sokhna. Accommodating train speeds of 250 kph the “Suez Canal on rails” will cut travel between the two cities to three hours, reported Egypt Independent on Sept. 5.
The scheme’s importance to Egypt was compared to the Suez Canal by Samcrete CEO Sherif Nazmy, who told Egypt Independent’s Arab-language parent newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm that it would be Egypt’s first new electric railway since 1854, and it will be the longest and largest railway in the Middle East, he said. The railway will pass through the cities of Sixth of October, Burj al-Arab and Alexandria.
Nazmy also explained that Egypt now joins the list of countries using express trains for freight and passenger transport, thus completing the big boom in transportation and the infrastructure and development projects that President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi started. According to Nazmy, the trains would be manufactured in east Port Said, with Chinese technology being transferred to Egypt.
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EIR Daily Alert Service