My paper investigates the emergence of joint-stock railway companies which explicitly identified their object as “land development” in the last decade of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Specifically, I explore the role of infrastructure in general and railways in particular in the production of land as an object of development. I make two central propositions. First, I propose that, in Egypt, “land development” in its political economic sense was first articulated in infrastructural terms and by infrastructure companies. The Egyptian Delta Light Railways and Fayoum Light Railway Company founded in 1893 and 1898 respectively were two of the first infrastructure companies to present their railway schemes explicitly in terms of “land development.” Prior to the last decade of the nineteenth century, land was conceived of in terms of its ability to produce surplus and capacity for natural exhaustion. Development was not yet something one could apply to land. By 1906, however, land development became a well-established corporate practice and was automatically tied to urban transport. The link between railroads and tramways on the one hand and land development on the other was consolidated with the establishment in 1906 of the Cairo Electric Railways and Heliopolis Oasis Company which precipitated the formation of Heliopolis, an upscale neighbourhood north of Cairo. The “development” of the “garden city” of Maadi in the south was similarly taken over by the Delta Light Railways company. Second, I propose that the transformation of land from a naturally exhaustible source of surplus to an object of infinite development, from exhaustible to inexhaustible, was underpinned by a specific configuration of Egypt’s debt as productive and advantageous to the country’s financial standing and conducive to its independence. Studies on debt in Egypt often assume that the British and French made the country’s independence conditional upon the fulfilment of its financial obligations to foreign banks. As I show in my analysis of railroad and tramway land development companies, it was the institutionalisation – not end – of borrowing which was the condition of Egypt’s self-rule and independence. Land development was an important financial instrument of this institutionalisation and the railroads were its technical apparatus. In making these two propositions, I rely on source material which includes bond certificates, mortgage registers, corporate memoranda and articles of association, as well as private archival collections which consist of private and official correspondence.