The Unlikely Revival Of A Great Middle Eastern Railroad

DARAA, Syria — In the center of this city in southern Syria is a long, rectangular warehouse constructed of black basalt. It is roofed with red ceramic tiles, originally placed in careful, sloping layers over a century ago. In 2014, a large section was blown out by a mortar shell.

Fragments of shattered tiles now carpet the concrete interior, their color catching in the sunlight. Amid the detritus when I visited recently stood a steam locomotive, number 161, manufactured in Berlin in 1914. It was designed with larger-than-usual wheels to handle the gradients of the journey west into the Yarmuk Valley, across the Jordan River and out to the Mediterranean coast at Haifa. In the early summer of 1967, Locomotive 161 returned to Daraa Station just hours after the Six-Day War began. No train has made that trip since.

The engine was repurposed to pull passenger cars between Damascus and the city of Bosra, once the Roman capital of Arabia. In 1985, it shuttled tens of thousands of adoring fans to see the iconic Lebanese singer Fairuz perform inside a spectacular Roman amphitheater at the Bosra International Festival. Later, in the 2000s, it adapted to a bi-weekly schedule to bring tourists from Jordan to visit the picturesque Syrian countryside, where they picnicked by a waterfall before returning across the border.

Then, in the spring of 2011, the trains stopped completely. Revolutionary slogans written on the walls of buildings across Daraa sparked mass protests. The police and the military were sent in. Dozens of dead became scores, then hundreds, then thousands. The city was besieged; troops occupied the railway station. The whole country descended into civil war. Syria became cut off from the rest of the world by conflict, sanctions and closed borders.

Locomotive 161 remained locked away in its engine shed. It avoided the shell that took out the roof, but nevertheless, it seemed unlikely it would ever move again. It was an emblem of a vanished era of cross-border travel and trade that seemed distant amid the isolation, the war. 

But then, at the end of last year, everything changed once more.

For thousands of years, Syria was a crossroads of empires, a pivotal point for Silk Road trade and a bridge connecting the Mediterranean to Mesopotamia and points further east. Damascus is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities on earth, long a religious and cultural center.

The city was also a natural gathering place for Hajj pilgrims journeying to the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina. But by the end of the 19th century, pilgrims from Anatolia, Central Asia and beyond were beginning to avoid the long overland trek, which crossed mountain ranges and deserts and was regularly attacked by armed groups. Instead, they favored maritime routes that were safer and quicker, especially with the introduction of steamships in the 1850s.

In 1900, Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II ordered the construction of the Hejaz Railway in part to reverse that trend. It was a time when the empire faced existential threats. Internal opposition was growing, and already during his reign, the Balkans and parts of North Africa, including Egypt, had been lost. The sultan hoped the ambitious 800-mile-long railway would help stitch his empire’s vast and disparate territory back together and cement him as caliph of the Islamic World in the process. There were military and economic considerations too. The railway could shuttle troops and materiel to reinforce Ottoman defensive positions on the Mediterranean and Red Seas and help counter British, French and other European expansionism and naval power.

The route would roughly follow that of the Hajj pilgrimage from Damascus to Medina, reducing a 40-day (one-way) journey by camel caravan to less than a week. Mecca was the original destination, but later, a deal was struck with Bedouin tribes to end the track short of the holy city, allowing them to continue escorting — and offering protection — to pilgrims along the final section.

The Hejaz Railway was the first in Ottoman territory that received no financing from foreign powers. Instead, a third of the total cost was raised by voluntary donations from the broader Muslim community. Money came from as far away as Singapore, Persia, South Africa and North America. The British tried to undermine contributions from subjects in India and Egypt, fearful of the threat the railway posed to their Red Sea hegemony. Money was sent regardless; propaganda was no match for piety. The railway was designated as waqf, an Islamic endowment, meaning the Ottomans did not own the lines — they simply managed them on behalf of God.

The main line from Damascus to Saudi Arabia was completed in 1908. By 1914, a side branch connected Damascus to Haifa via Daraa, bypassing the French-owned rail line from Damascus to Beirut. 

But by 1917, large sections already lay in ruins. Arab tribes and British soldiers — including the famous intelligence officer T. E. Lawrence, or “Lawrence of Arabia” — destroyed parts of it during World War I and the Great Arab Revolt, when the Hashemites rose up against the Ottomans. 

Although it only functioned in its entirety for less than a decade, the Hejaz Railway held a special place in Syrians’ sense of identity and national pride. At one point, it had awed the world. It continued to operate in some form in Syria until 2011, and even as its condition declined, it still played a role in the national service that reached almost every major city in the country and ran south across the border to Jordan and north into Turkey.

In the years since, the railway’s fortunes have continued to crumble, fragmenting along with the region as countries and communities became more forcefully disconnected. 

The once-grand Hejaz Railway Station overlooks a busy intersection in downtown Damascus. Designed to make a suitably striking impression on those preparing to travel, it has a handsome, ornately decorated façade and a marble-pillared entrance hall. Inside, high stained-glass windows splatter color across an airy waiting room. 

But like the country and the city, the station has suffered in recent years. Even before the civil war, it had fallen out of practical usage. Tracks had been ripped out to make way for real estate development. Now that 54 years of rule by the Assad family has ended, families of people who had disappeared have gathered there, hoping to find signs of the missing. Like the railway as a whole, the station has become a reminder of what has vanished: a station without trains, an empire long gone.

Three miles south of the glamorous Hejaz Station is Al Qadem, where the real railroad work was done. For years during the war, the train depot had been closed off as a military zone. On a bright, cold morning in January, I arrived to meet Yehya Helwani, 72, and Mazen Malla, 60. Both old-timers had spent their careers on the railroad. Helwani, who sported a delightfully broad and twirled mustache, recently retired after 57 years of service with the railway. Malla still lives in an Ottoman-era building on the depot compound. His father and grandfather worked on the railway; in his wallet, he carried a black-and-white photograph of his grandfather driving a train.

Helwani and Malla led me on a long walk. At one time, Al Qadem was a sprawling network of warehouses and factories covering nearly 50 acres and manned by over 750 employees. It was the largest depot anywhere on the route. Now, many of its roofs have caved in, some from artillery fire, and Ottoman-era machinery and locomotives were covered in rust and dust. Soldiers had hidden tanks and ammunition caches in bunkers dug across the depot, and the ground was uneven, potholed and littered with spent bullets. “When I first came back here, I cried a lot,” Helwani said. “I can’t explain what this place means to me. It’s part of me. It’s part of all Syrians.”

The rails that once carried trains from Damascus via Daraa to the Jordanian border are still largely in place, but it has been 14 years since a locomotive made the journey. The infrastructure is severely neglected, and the tracks and surrounding areas have been turned into a warren of holes dug by treasure hunters. There’s an enduring myth that fleeing Ottoman soldiers left gold behind. Since the fall of the regime, and with a severe lack of police and security services in many parts of the country, the problem has gotten worse.

Parallel to a busy road crossing, the railway is swallowed by a quarter-mile-wide, heavily-militarized buffer zone at the border. To approach it on either side, as I found out, arouses significant suspicion.

Once into northern Jordan, the tracks flow through green hills and across long, arched, century-old bridges. Eventually, they are swallowed by a gray urban sprawl leading to the capital, Amman. Early photographs of railway construction show bare hillsides, a free-flowing river and a few small homes made by Circassian settlers, who had fled ethnic cleansing in the Caucasus and were resettled by the Ottomans in sparsely inhabited areas. Amman today is a concrete jungle home to four million people, with even the river covered by a highway.

From spring to autumn, the Jordan Hejaz Railway Corporation operates a trip from Amman to Giza Station, close to the international airport. It takes around two hours and is the last section of the original railway that’s open to the public. Last spring, I joined a driver as he tested a diesel locomotive before the journey opened to all.

From an antique olive-green passenger car, I watched housing blocks and side streets slide by. We crossed a two-tiered Ottoman bridge, car traffic swarming on the section below us. Where the tracks crossed the road, a train worker leaned aggressively on the horn while colleagues watched for cars, pedestrians and animals. The sound was deafening, our pace slow — a galloping horse or good bicycle could have left us in the dust. But elderly ladies smiled and teenagers took selfies as we passed. To see a train trundle through here now is a novelty.

In Jordan, the sense of connection to something greater is still there. An architect in Amman called the railway “the last of the sublime projects of an Islamic empire.” In 1920, Abdullah, the second son of Sharif Hussein bin Ali — emir of Mecca and leader of the Great Arab Revolt — arrived in Jordan by train; a year later, he established the Emirate of Transjordan. Jordanians I met sometimes spoke of the railway as one of the foundations of their country, by which they meant the railway delivered the man who established the kingdom. A building at Ma’an Station, in the south of the country where Abdullah first arrived, became his first palace. Today, it is a pleasant museum with polished stone, replica roof tiles and a landscaped garden.

Ma’an is the southern gateway to the desert. It is also the point at which the condition of the railway really begins to deteriorate. By the time the route reaches a station called Batn Al Ghoul, adjacent to Wadi Rum, all the rails have disappeared. Many were stolen for scrap; all that’s left behind is a raised embankment. Station floors have been dug out by excavators and walls pulled apart by treasure hunters. It’s a vision of what might happen in Syria if the digging is not stopped soon.

Crossing the border into Saudi Arabia, I found the same. Fences have been erected around the old stations, but most are unmonitored, the barriers cut open. There is still some sense of imposing grandeur in the two-storey buildings, with arched entranceways and balconies. There are often no other structures for miles around, so they stand out as interlopers in the landscape. But it would be a surprise if they are still there in a decade. Many are skeletal, the interiors looted long ago, the floors and roofs relentlessly smashed to pieces in the search for treasure.

The Hejaz region is a landscape of sharp, rocky hills and wide, dimpled wadis. I walked around 150 miles in this area, following the embankment closely. In the middle of the day, it is excruciating to be outside under the sun; even the few camel herders I met sought shade under Acacia trees. Those who saw me walking would shake their heads and then beckon me over to share a little shade and camel milk. I thought during these times of the workers who built this railway, including the many wide bridges and culverts to protect it against seasonal flooding and sand drifts. It must have seemed so improbable to imagine subjugating such a place with only metal, wood and toil. And yet it worked: as a feat of engineering, it was remarkable; many of the Ottoman interventions are still in place, even as more modern bridges have crumbled or been washed away. At night, I slept close to the track and watched as the desert became bathed in evening light, with vivid greens of hardy plants in the dried riverbeds popping against crimson sandstone.

Though much of the Saudi portion of the railway has been ripped up or disappeared into the desert, the station at Tabuk, in the north of the country, has been converted into a small museum. There are few artifacts and fewer visitors. In AlUla, an oasis town at the center of the grand vision to transform the Kingdom culturally and economically over the next few years, the railway has been included in the development plan. But on the ground, little has happened to the railroad, even as the surrounding areas of the town, oasis and desert evolve quickly. I was even told on a few occasions by railway employees around AlUla that they’d been instructed not to talk about it. Their best guess was that the Ottoman period was not something the current national leadership wanted to dwell on, and the Hejaz Railway is an inconvenient reminder.

Medain Saleh, a station close to the magnificent rock-cut Nabataean site at Hegra, has been transformed in a different way — into a luxury hotel. It is one of a number of boutique, themed hotels in the area, with astronomical prices aimed at a high-end market. It could be said that just as the Ottomans projected power through the development of major projects like the Hejaz Railway, the Saudis today do the same with their mega-projects.

Ironically, there has been an explosion of rail projects in the Middle East. Or, at least, the paperwork that precedes them.

On the Arabian Peninsula, a proposed project called the Gulf Railway would link Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait by 2028. There are plans for metro systems and inter-city rail networks to connect numerous regional capitals; a high-speed train already runs between Mecca and Medina, completing what the Hejaz Railway could not.

The International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), a project mired in endless discussions for over two decades, will purportedly connect India and Iran to Russia and northern Europe via almost 4,500 miles of maritime, road and rail networks. There’s also a network of roads and railways called the Iraq Development Road that would connect the port at Al Faw, Iraq, with Turkey and then Europe beyond. For goods shipped from Asia to Europe, it could potentially be days shorter than the route through the Suez Canal. Both Qatar and UAE have signed on, suggesting ample funding and some state-level cooperation. Alongside the INSTC and the Iraq Development Road, as well as China’s Belt and Road Initiative, is a U.S. and EU-led project called the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC).

All these regional infrastructure projects seem to share the same unoriginality in their naming process, but they also suggest a fragmentation of the international system and a move toward multipolarity. Especially as Donald Trump takes a hatchet to America’s work abroad, in this newly interdependent, interconnected world, the middle powers — countries without a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council but with significant regional influence — are flexing their muscles and forming new alliances.

Syria has once again become a potential participant in these projects. Bashar al-Assad was a major impediment to Syria’s historic role as a crossroads of travelers and goods. Now that his reign has ended, the possibility of Syria integrating into the region seems much more likely. Turkey backed sections of the Syrian opposition for years and is now in a prime position to take advantage of new leadership in Damascus. In late December, the Turkish transportation minister, Abdulkadir Uraloğlu, said he wanted steps taken “to restore the railway connection [from Istanbul] to Damascus.” Referring specifically to the Hejaz Railway, he said, “This project is not just about restoring a railway; it is about reconnecting a historical legacy.”

Mohammed Ajami, the new general manager of the Hejaz and Syrian Railways, agreed. Ajami arrived in Damascus in December with other appointees from Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the main rebel group. When I met him, he wore a tailored three-piece suit and sat bathed in red light from a stained-glass window at the Hejaz Station. The lack of electricity — a common issue in Damascus — made the colors even more pronounced.

Ajami identified three important aspects of the railway: to develop Syria’s industrial economy via the shipment of goods, passenger transportation and to protect the nation’s heritage. This old railroad was still symbolic of a better time for Syria. It was something to be proud of; as I traveled there this year, pride was clearly something many Syrians were keen to reclaim. 

“The Hejaz is older than our Ministry of Transportation,” noted Na’im Al Karazeh, the manager of the station at Daraa. “It’s part of the heritage of Syria.” In the past, people came to admire the audacity of the railway infrastructure, he told me. Look at the grandeur of the Hejaz Station in Damascus, he urged. “Look at what our country used to be like.” Helwani echoed this sentiment: “When we worked on the railway, we knew we were part of this long, rich history of Syria.”

I asked Ajami if he could really envision the railway operating again. He said simply, “We had a bigger dream than this: to remove Bashar Al-Assad. After that, everything is possible.”