This paper narrates the end of empire in Egypt through the story of the administration of state railways. It will explore how railways functioned as a crucial element in the managerial architecture of British colonialism, connecting Egypt in very concrete, and uneven, ways to the larger world of empire. Railways transported cash crops (mainly Egyptian cotton) for export into the world economy; they enabled the extension of British control over equipment procurement; and they ensured the Egyptian state's regular payment of its international debt obligations). The paper will examine how, in the twentieth century, these mundane processes and arrangements of railway administration became sites where the meanings of self-rule and the technical possibilities of national independence were worked out as Egypt, beginning in the 1920s, underwent a gradual process of managerial disarticulation as a territorial component of the British Empire.