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Railway lines once connected the Middle East
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Re: Railway lines once connected the Middle East
#12Just finished reading Murder on the Orient Express yesterday and made a (naive) mental note to travel the route sometime. This shattered that dream for sure.
The book was somewhat uplifting, portraying the age where the entire world was accessible and you could go anywhere and folks would bow their heads before you everywhere.
Re: Railway lines once connected the Middle East
#13Re: Railway lines once connected the Middle East
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I visited the Israel/Lebanon border a few years back and stood at the spot where Israeli guerillas destroyed the British tracks after World War 2. Regardless of whether you champion or despise their politics, it's something that actually happened, and the folks who did it aren't ashamed to post infographics about it on-site.
Re: Railway lines once connected the Middle East
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Re: Railway lines once connected the Middle East
#16Re: Railway lines once connected the Middle East
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Israel's territory is probably 1/100 of the territory on the map in the article. So unlikely.
Rail is a network. Losing a well-connected node can be fatal to the network.
We've had almost 100 years to route around that node, if thats the problem. But it hasn't happened... has it?
Re: Railway lines once connected the Middle East
#18Re: Railway lines once connected the Middle East
#19At least in Israel, many of the old lines, even if they still operated today, would have been long obsolete. A daily train leaving Haifa at 8:30 and reaching Jaffa by lunch? Three, four hours? The same line today makes the journey in an hour, and there are plans on the table to build additional tracks to cut that down to a half hour. People commute from Haifa to Tel Aviv, with three (soon four) tracks passing through the Ayalon bottleneck.
Or, take the line to Jerusalem. The old line took a twisty, no-tunnels approach up the hills to Jerusalem that took hours. It was mostly only used to get out of the city in case snow blocked the main entrance, because it was so slow. The new line, with tunnels and bridges, cuts right through and makes the journey to Tel Aviv in an hour.
It doesn't really matter what the Ottomans or the British built, because it was built for a level of traffic of a largely rural, empty empire. It would never have met modern needs. As populations grew across the Middle East, even a Middle East at peace, all of these lines would have long been dismembered anyway, and replaced with lines designed to actually meet the transportation needs of the people who lived there.
Re: Railway lines once connected the Middle East
#20This article made me think about how the presence of trains indicate peace. Trains are so vulnerable to attack. Their existence depends on everyone with access to the tracks to trust and agree with their purpose. I suspect if we're mourning these trains, we also mourn the loss of peace and stability in the region.
As an aside, TIL that there are actually two Tripolis, one in Libya and the other in Lebanon.
I have heard references to an ancient, historical Tripoli for years, even in the lyrics of Onward, Christian Soldier. I only knew about the Libyan city and thought the article was mistaken when it referred to "Tripoli, Beirut and Haifa" together as Levantine ports, but "The last train left Tripoli for Beirut at the start of Lebanon’s civil war in 1975" tipped me off that my geography was off, since a train from Libya to Lebanon would not have been possible after Israel closed her borders.