Rail relics inspire GCC dream

The rusting vestiges of a railway that connected Beirut to Damascus during the Ottoman Empire was the first in the Arab world. It lies in ruins today, but the Arabian Gulf is keeping alive hopes of interlinking the region

A tree grows through a rusted locomotive at the deserted train station in the town of Rayak in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Wael Hamzeh / EPA

On the outskirts of the town of Rayak in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley are the last remains not just of a fallen empire, but a shattered dream.

These rusting steam engines and rotting buildings were once part of the first railway in the Arab world.

Built at the end of the 19th century, the line connected Beirut to Damascus in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire.

At its height, the network of railways included the Hejaz Railway, which ran from Damascus to Medina, passing through what is now Jordan and with branch lines to Haifa and Nablus. After reaching Aleppo it was possible to change for Istanbul and then on to the cities of Europe.

Rayak was not just a terminus, but also an important centre for the manufacture of trains. However, passenger services ended in 1975 because of the 15-year civil war that began that year, and the town was occupied by Syrian troops until 2005.

No trains of any description have run in Lebanon since the early 1990s, but there are still hopes that Rayak could be revived as a museum and perhaps one day even as a working line.

Remnants of other railways can be seen across the Levant, including the Jaffa to Jerusalem line and sections of the Hejaz Railway, once viewed by Turkey as vital to its control of the southernmost lands of the Ottoman Empire and the holy cities of Medina and Mecca.

The height of these ambitions was the proposal to build a railway from Berlin to Baghdad, the result of an alliance between Germany and Turkey. The Arab Revolt and defeat in the First World War ended the project, which would have challenged British hegemony in India and the Arabian Gulf.

But not perhaps the dream. Etihad Rail, which is due to begin services in the Western Region shortly, is part of the much bigger GCC rail project that will eventually run passenger services across Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain and Kuwait.

Once completed, the Arabian Gulf Railway will extend to Basra. If peace can return to Iraq, services could reach the Turkish border and, with the new Bosporus rail tunnel, open up an unbroken connection that would allow trains to run from London to Dubai.