Two freight trains collided inside the yard of Al-Balida station in Giza. The freight train collision happened in the Al-Ayyat area, just after midnight on Thursday. Egypt’s National Railways Authority confirmed the incident in a statement.
A driver and his assistant were injured. The authority said the freight train collision struck at around 12am on 10 September. A locomotive and two wagons from one of the trains came off the rails.
Rescue teams reached Al-Balida within minutes. Officials had not confirmed any further casualties by the time the statement was issued. Cranes and emergency crews were sent to the station soon after.
Their job was to clear the wreckage and free the track. The Cairo to Aswan High Dam line kept running on a single line in both directions. This allowed trains to keep moving while recovery work continued.
Egypt’s National Railways Authority apologised to passengers for the delays. It said the freight train collision had disrupted the normal schedule on both lines. Engineering teams were working to restore full operations quickly.
The line links Cairo to Upper Egypt. It carries a steady mix of passenger and goods traffic through Giza’s rural districts every day. Even a brief single-track diversion can ripple through the wider timetable.
Al-Balida sits close to the town of Al-Ayyat. This stretch of railway holds a grim place in Egypt’s transport history. It was the site of the country’s worst rail disaster in 2002, when fire tore through a passenger train and killed more than 360 people.
A separate collision on the same corridor killed around 50 people in 2009. A level crossing accident added further deaths in 2016. Together, they have made Al-Ayyat a recurring name in Egypt’s safety record.
Thursday’s freight train collision follows other recent accidents on the network. A passenger train derailed near Marsa Matruh on Egypt’s north coast roughly a year ago. Three people died and 94 were injured in that crash.
That accident renewed public criticism of the network’s ageing infrastructure. Maintenance standards have also come under scrutiny. A freight train overturned near Badrashin in Giza in October 2024 after striking a loader on the line. That incident has clear echoes of Thursday’s freight train collision.
Egypt’s rail network is the oldest in Africa and the second oldest in the world. It logs hundreds of accidents most years, despite repeated government pledges to overhaul it. Close to 11,700 incidents were recorded on the network between 2014 and 2023, according to official figures cited by regional outlets.
That pace has kept rail safety near the top of the transport ministry’s agenda. It is against this backdrop that Thursday’s freight train collision will be assessed. No fatalities were reported in connection with the crash. Egypt’s National Railways Authority confirmed only the two injured rail workers as casualties. That update came on Thursday morning.
An investigation into the cause has not yet been announced. The transport ministry has typically formed technical committees after similar crashes. These panels are tasked with establishing what went wrong and assigning responsibility.
For now, the priority at Al-Balida is practical. Engineers must clear the damaged wagons and inspect the track bed. Only then can the second line return to service, allowing Cairo-bound and Upper Egypt-bound trains to resume their normal timetable.
