Railways have fundamentally transformed Egyptian landscapes since its initial construction in 1851. Railway allowed faster communication among separated places and reduced discomfort of long-distance traveling. For many contemporary witnesses, railways functioned as an idealized carrier and ultimate embodiment of modernity, providing a confirmation of technological change and progress that started to re-organize the everyday life of people living in Egypt. However, railways also crystalized the lopsidedness of development between the imperial center and colonial Egypt. With the Alexandria Port as the ultimate destination of most freight trains, railways connected domestic market and international trade with much more efficiency and reliability, paving way for the rapid expansion of global capitalism at the expense of local handicraft industries, and furthermore direct colonial rule encroaching the sovereignty of Egypt. Railways, therefore, was accompanied by, if not give rise to, three major transformations during the second half of the nineteenth century: modernization, de-industrialization, and colonialization. My research will zero in on Egyptian technocrats and intellectuals in their critical reflections on railways from 1870 till 1919. Gradual yet steady localization of railway technology created groups of Egyptians including state officials, engineers, public intellectuals, and railway hobbyists, who worked on or attended special attention to the rail system. Trained in new schools of engineering and liberal arts, this batch of ambitious intellectuals embarked on a determined process of modernization, and work to integrate European science and technology with circumstances of the Egyptian society. They were eager to participate in everyday railway operations, translate railway-related knowledge, and promote railways to a wider pool of audiences. Railways, in other words, encapsulated their ambition of creating a modern Egypt. Meanwhile, these intellectuals were not unaware of the unequal relation between Egypt and Europe, embodied in the priority of the British in taking railway travel, unfavorable restrictions of technology transfer, and afterwards strictly hierarchical railway administration in the high tide of colonialism. In response to these situations, my question will focus on how these intellectuals analyzed possible impact of railways on the local economy; how they thought about railways and national sovereignty; what they proposed to reverse the relative disadvantage of Egypt within the colonial world order. In answering these questions, I will reveal multiplicities of debates among Egyptian intellectuals revolving railways, which eventually burst out into the tumultuous upsurge of anti-colonial nationalism in 1919.