The whole catalogue, laid out as a single page.

The four core publication series we index in full are: the monthly ENR planning-office bulletins, which since 1995 have been the principal Arabic-language record of operational changes and the only consistent source on rolling-stock condition; the British National Archives FO and BT series covering the original British construction records of the 1850s through the 1900s; the French Compagnie des chemins de fer archive (preserved at the Centre des Archives Diplomatiques in Nantes), which holds the records of the French companies that operated the Egyptian network on concession from 1903 until nationalisation in 1956; and the published proceedings of the biennial Egyptian Railway Engineering Society conferences. Outside these we index any peer-reviewed publication that addresses one of our seven covered subjects; the index has approximately 1,920 entries at the date of this page.

What we deliberately do not index: travel-blog posts, content-marketing pages from booking platforms, unsourced compilations, and online encyclopedias that themselves cite none of the above. The point of an academic-grade index is that every entry can be verified at the holding library. We do include the popular Egyptian-Arabic monthly al-Sikka (1962-2003) and its successor al-Qatar al-Misri (2007-present), because their operational reportage of the network is contemporaneous and is not otherwise preserved in English.

The most-used section of the index is the Khedival-station building chronology, which maps each surviving 19th-century station against its construction date, engineer of record, original station-master appointment, and published architectural-history references. The chronology cross-references against the Whitebridge BNA Kew material (200+ archival sources) and is the unique Sikka Press contribution to the Egyptian-railway literature.

A second important section is the rolling-stock concordance, which maps every passenger and freight class in current ENR service against its manufacturing origin, year of acquisition, and current operational deployment. The Talgo-Spanish locomotives and carriages introduced in 2024 are the most recent addition; the older Soviet-built series from the 1960s are still in service on regional routes and are documented in detail. Eng. Younis on the contributor bench leads this section.

The third section is the fare-class history concordance, which tracks the multiple fare classes (First, Second, Spanish, Economy and the older "tourist" class abolished in 2018) against their effective dates, ticket-price evolution adjusted for inflation, and the seat-reservation system as it has evolved from the 1980s manual ledger to the current online platform. Subscribers preparing detailed travel budgets use this section as a starting point.

Subscribers at Library and Field tiers can request a consolidated PDF of any concordance subset, delivered within two working days; Reader-tier subscribers can request individual entries on a one-off basis through the desk at no charge. The bibliographic system is the single distinctive feature of the desk and the reason most subscribers stay past the first month.

The maintenance work behind the bibliographic system is genuinely labour-intensive — the quarterly cross-checks against new ENR planning-office bulletins, the cross-references against new archival material as it appears in academic publication, the verification of object dates and engineer-of-record attributions. Eng. Younis spends an average of fifteen hours per quarter on the rolling-stock concordance alone, and Dr. Tantawi spends a comparable amount on the station chronology. The cumulative count of fulfilled subscriber concordance requests since the system was introduced in 2018 is 312, including 58 in the current calendar year.

Beyond the four primary publication series we also index the Egyptian railway press archive held at the National Library and Archives in Cairo (Dar al-Kutub), which preserves both the official ENR house-press from 1962 onward and the older Khedival railway-engineering periodicals from the late 19th century. Access to the National Library archive for our editors is by standing arrangement; subscribers needing specific archive references can request them through the desk and we will route the enquiry to the relevant librarian.

The bibliographic system is not, by intent, a comprehensive catalogue of Egyptian railway publications — there are major academic treatments we deliberately omit because they have been superseded by later work, and there are popular publications we exclude because they do not meet our verification standard. The structure is curated: every entry has a documented reason for inclusion, and that documentation is available to subscribers on request. The point is the working academic-grade reference; specialists in adjacent fields (transport economics, colonial-engineering history, French Egyptian relations 1882–1956) typically find our index a productive starting point and complement it with their own field's primary publications.