How a scheduling spreadsheet became a planning desk
In early 2017 Amr Saleh left his post in the Egyptian National Railways scheduling department with a folder of timetable data and a frustration he'd watched build for years: foreign visitors consistently arrived at stations with the wrong ticket for the wrong train on the wrong day. Not because they hadn't tried to research the network — they had — but because the information they found online ranged from outdated to simply wrong.
Egypt's intercity rail is one of the most useful transport networks in the region. Cairo to Alexandria in under two and a half hours by Spanish express. Cairo to Aswan overnight in a private cabin with dinner, for less than a mid-range hotel. Three metro lines threading through one of the world's most congested city centres. The system works, and it works well — but the interface between international traveller and Egyptian railway has always been opaque. The booking website appears and disappears. The fare displayed online is not always the fare asked at the counter. The sleeper is run by a completely different operator and has its own booking flow. First class and air-conditioned second class sound like a simple hierarchy, but the practical difference on a three-hour trip is minimal.
Amr's initial instinct was a simple reference page: a table of fares, a note about booking methods, a paragraph on each class. That first version went up in October 2017 under the egypt-passes.xyz domain, expecting a modest audience of budget travellers planning Nile trips. Within a year, the desk was fielding multi-city itineraries from tour operators, travel bloggers and independent travellers who had found conflicting information everywhere else and wanted a single authoritative source they could quote back to a station agent.
That growth forced the desk to become more systematic. Heba Darwish joined in 2018 to manage route research — riding legs, recording actual journey times, photographing station signage and ticket machines, and logging the gap between published and actual fares. Khaled Mansour came on in 2019 to take over the fares database, building a structured spreadsheet that cross-references ENR published prices, tourist-rate windows and seasonal variations. Salma Younis rounded out the team in 2021, handling the growing volume of traveller queries and turning the most repeated questions into the reference content you'll find across the site today.
The desk remains small by intention. We do not sell train tickets, do not take commissions from any booking channel and do not partner with tour operators on a referral basis. The planning advice we give is independent of any commercial relationship. Our revenue is the planning service we charge for multi-city itineraries; the general information on the site is free to everyone.
Key numbers
2017 — founded in Giza, Egypt
9 main ENR lines covered
3 Cairo Metro lines documented
4 full-time researchers and liaisons
Updated monthly — fares reviewed every month; major timetable revisions tracked within one week of ENR publication
How the desk operates
Three research disciplines, maintained in parallel, feeding a single planning recommendation for every rail enquiry we receive.
Timetable tracking
Egyptian National Railways publishes schedule changes irregularly and sometimes with short notice. We subscribe to ENR bulletins, track the main intercity departure boards and run a monthly cross-check of published versus observed departure times on the highest-traffic corridors. When we log a consistent pattern — an express that runs 25 minutes late on Fridays, a service that effectively operates three days a week despite being listed daily — that goes into the notes we share with travellers. The goal is not to criticise the railway; it's to give you a realistic expectation for your specific travel day.
Fares database
ENR sets official fares, but travellers sometimes encounter a different price — a tourist supplement on certain trains, a fare corrected at the counter, or a class that no longer runs on a route where it once did. Khaled maintains a structured fares register that separates published prices from field-verified prices, flags the legs where we know a discrepancy exists, and logs the date of our most recent verification. Every planning recommendation cites a verified price, not a scraped rate, and includes a caveat if the last field check was more than 60 days earlier.
Booking channel review
The ENR website, the Wataniya sleeper portal, station ticket counters, third-party apps, travel agents — each has a different coverage of services, a different payment method acceptance, and a different failure mode. We test each channel quarterly from a non-Egyptian card and log what works, what requires workarounds, and what is simply unavailable to a foreign visitor without a local bank account. If the website is down for a week in peak season, we note it and recommend the counter. If the sleeper portal rejects VISA but accepts Mastercard, we say so.
Four people, four disciplines
Everyone on the desk has a specific research role. The planning recommendations you receive come from their combined current knowledge, not from a static FAQ written three years ago.
Amr Saleh
Amr spent eleven years in the Egyptian National Railways scheduling department before founding Nile Rail Pass in 2017. His role there focused on intercity express timetabling — specifically the Cairo–Alexandria and Cairo–Luxor/Aswan corridors — which gave him an unusually detailed view of why the published timetable and the operational reality sometimes diverge. He brought that institutional knowledge out of the railway and into the public domain, translating scheduling logic into practical traveller guidance. Today Amr oversees the desk's overall methodology: how we verify information, when we mark data as stale, and how we frame planning recommendations that are honest about uncertainty rather than falsely confident. He reviews every multi-city itinerary before it goes back to a traveller, particularly on legs where class availability or booking channel reliability has been inconsistent. Outside the desk he writes a periodic column on Egyptian transport infrastructure for a regional urban planning newsletter — rail is both his profession and his genuine subject.
Heba Darwish
Heba joined the desk in 2018 as its first hire, brought in specifically to do what a desk operating from an office cannot do on its own: ride the trains. Her research method is systematic field verification — she travels each major intercity corridor at least once per quarter, logging actual departure and arrival times, photographing signage, ticket machines and platform facilities at key stations, and noting anything that differs from the published description. Her route notes are the backbone of the intercity routes and sleeper trains sections. Heba is also the desk's primary contact for accessibility-related queries: she documents lift and ramp availability at stations, the practicalities of navigating Cairo's main termini with luggage, and the realistic gap between the station map and the physical station. She reads and speaks Arabic, English and French, which makes her uniquely useful for reading station signage, understanding verbal directions from station staff, and cross-referencing Arabic-language ENR publications that never get translated officially.
Khaled Mansour
Khaled joined in 2019 to own one specific problem: fare accuracy. Before Nile Rail Pass, Khaled worked in travel technology, building price-comparison tools for a regional OTA. That background gave him a forensic attitude toward fare data — the difference between a published price, a quoted price and a paid price is not always the same number, and the gap matters to a traveller on a budget. His fares database now covers all main ENR intercity classes, Wataniya sleeper tariffs across the three cabin categories, and Cairo Metro ticket types including the new tap-on system. He tests booking channels quarterly with non-Egyptian payment cards, logs every transaction result, and flags the gaps between the ENR online system's stated coverage and its practical foreign-card acceptance. Khaled also handles the pass type comparisons — working out when a traveller buying three separate legs would be better served by a different sequence, when the sleeper fare beats a night's hotel plus a day ticket, and when the ordinary class is genuinely the sensible option rather than a budget compromise. His methodology is referenced in the pass types guide and the booking guide.
Salma Younis
Salma joined in 2021, initially to manage the volume of planning enquiries that had outgrown the inbox. Her role quickly expanded. Every question a traveller asks is either answered by existing content, which Salma handles directly, or it represents a gap — something the desk hasn't documented yet or has documented poorly. She tracks those gaps, escalates them to the relevant researcher, and turns the answers into new reference content. She is also responsible for the quality of the planning responses that go back to travellers: checking that the recommendation is consistent with current fares data, that the booking channel cited is currently operational, and that the leg sequence makes sense logistically. If Amr is the institutional brain of the desk and Heba and Khaled are its field and data legs, Salma is the mechanism that connects those three functions to an actual human planning a trip. She has a background in customer experience from the hospitality sector, which shows: the planning documents the desk produces read like something written by someone who has sat across a table from a confused traveller and worked it out with them, rather than like a system-generated itinerary. Questions about an existing plan, requests for a follow-up, and all general contact enquiries route through Salma first.
Nine years of the desk
Founded in Giza
Amr Saleh launches egypt-passes.xyz as a reference site for Egyptian rail. First published content covers Cairo–Alexandria, Cairo–Luxor/Aswan fares and class comparisons. Initial scope: intercity express trains only.
Field research begins
Heba Darwish joins as route researcher. First systematic field-verification programme starts: quarterly rides on main corridors, station photography archive, gap log between timetable and operation.
Fares database launched
Khaled Mansour joins and builds the structured fares register. Booking channel testing protocol formalised. Coverage expands to Wataniya sleeper tariffs and fare discrepancy logging. Cairo Metro guide added.
Desk stabilises through disruption
Global travel disruption pauses most planning requests. The desk uses the period to conduct a full audit of existing route notes, update Delta regional coverage and document the Port Said corridor for the first time.
Traveller liaison role created
Salma Younis joins. Planning enquiry volume returns to pre-2020 levels within six months; a structured response workflow replaces the informal inbox system. Multi-city itinerary service formalised with defined turnaround time.
Cairo Metro tap-on system documented
ENR introduces new tap-on ticketing on the metro. The desk publishes the first English-language guide to the new system within two weeks of launch, including foreign card compatibility testing results.
Station guide expanded
Full station guide published for Cairo Ramses, Cairo Giza, Alexandria Sidi Gaber, Luxor and Aswan. Includes platform layout, locker availability, accessible routes and taxi/transfer notes from each station.
Desk operating today
All core services current. Fares database updated monthly. Field rides quarterly on main corridors. Booking channel tests quarterly. Planning enquiries answered within two business days. Read about the full range of services or send a route to get started.
What we will and won't do
No ticket sales
We do not sell Egyptian National Railways tickets, Wataniya sleeper reservations, Cairo Metro tokens or any other transport product. We tell you what to buy, how to buy it and where — the transaction is always between you and the official channel. This is not a legal limitation; it's a deliberate choice that keeps our advice free of commercial incentive. We have no interest in recommending one booking route over another because of a margin. The right answer for your leg is what we recommend, period.
Prices in EGP, not converted
All fares on the site are quoted in Egyptian pounds, because that is what you will pay and what the ticket will say. We do not convert to USD, EUR or GBP for two reasons: exchange rates move, and a converted figure gives a false sense of precision about what is ultimately a variable. We give you the EGP number, the context of what that represents (cheap, mid, expensive by local standards), and the note if a tourist-rate supplement applies on a particular service. You convert with your bank's current rate at the moment you book.
Verification date on all data
Every fare figure and booking-channel note on the site carries a last-verified date. If the data is older than 90 days, that is flagged explicitly. Railway fares in Egypt have moved significantly in recent years; a figure from 2022 is not useful for a 2026 booking. We treat stale data as a problem to fix, not a gap to ignore. If you receive a planning recommendation from us and the fare has since changed when you go to book, contact us — we want to know and we will correct the relevant entry.
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