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Railway lines once connected the Middle East
- golemiprague 5y ago
- sanxiyn 5y ago
- 13of40 5y agoI 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.
- golemiprague 5y ago
- NmAmDa 5y ago
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoThey had been working the land, making arid desert farmable and installing infrastructure, since at least the 1880s.
- NmAmDa 5y agoSo it was an empty land and no one was forced out of their homes?. Classical zionism propaganda.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoI did not say that.
- dogma1138 5y agoThe Night of the Bridges had nothing to do with the war of independence as it happened in 1946 and was intended to disrupt the logistics of the British army not to prevent an invasion by Arab states. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Bridges https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Bridges
- inglor_cz 5y agoHello there with a Czech sounding name :) Isn't there a vague plan to reconnect at least Jordan and Israel by rail?
- Arnt 5y agohttps://archive.fo/axzOJ https://archive.fo/axzOJ and so sad. I love watching the landscape roll past the train window.
- j_koreth 5y agoWhat an incredibly sad read.
- selimthegrim 5y agoThe article is good but since when is Algeria on the Red Sea?
- foxes 5y agoWe really need to eliminate car dependence in our cities.
- fennecfoxen 5y agoPerhaps, but the existence of regional rail transit on the Istanbul-to-Basra scale is only weakly connected to "car dependence in cities".
- Ericson2314 5y agoMmm don't sell it too short. Long distance passengers become non-drivers art least initially at either end. Good city-center stations will not have parking or rental cars nearby.
- 0x0nyandesu 5y agoSpeak for yourself. The last thing I want during covid is to be stuck in a metal box with 100 strangers uncomfortably wearing masks instead of in my own car blasting music with the window down.
- dr_dshiv 5y agoAvoiding car dependence in cities doesn't mean they will take away your car. It just means that I don't need to use a car to live there.
- Mirioron 5y agoIt kind of does though. People online cheer when city centers become closed to cars. Spreading it further probably means restricting cars more. I don't really disagree with your overall stance, but those two do often go hand in hand. Perhaps that's why progress is slow on that front.
- Gigachad 5y agoYou still get to have your car, it just means you can't drive it right through the middle of a dense living area, you'll have to park on the edge and walk/tram/scooter in. Which is the best for everyone.
- sanxiyn 5y ago
- starik36 5y agoIsrael's territory is probably 1/100 of the territory on the map in the article. So unlikely.
- sanxiyn 5y agoRail is a network. Losing a well-connected node can be fatal to the network.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoWe've had almost 100 years to route around that node, if thats the problem. But it hasn't happened... has it?
- dogma1138 5y agoIsrael isn’t the reason why the trains between Iran and Iraq or between Lebanon and Syria aren’t running. None of the infrastructure nor even the routes would be viable for a modern railroad infrastructure, blaming Israel for the utter lack of investment in infrastructure across the Middle East is laughable.
- jimmyed 5y agoJust 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.
- tomcam 5y agoWait p, folks don’t bow their heads before you everywhere? You’re just doing it wrong, m8!
- matterhorn2000 5y agoThe imperialist approach you have may be better suited for a different century.
- beebeepka 5y agoMaybe he's a royalty or deserves to be treated like one. It's incredible you and tomcam were downvoted
- gromitss 5y ago
- solatic 5y agoAt 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.
- inglor_cz 5y agoLeaving the most pictoresque one in operation as a tourist magnet (not for daily commute) would definitely work, though. It works in many European countries, especially where the landscape is beautiful, and the Levant has no shortage of stunning landscapes.
- shimonamit 5y agoThey did, at least in Israel. The Jerusalem-Beit Shemesh route was restored and it is a beautiful commute.
- inglor_cz 5y agoI found a video of its stunning beauty. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_urfQTLk_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_urfQTLk_g The author says that the line closed in March 2020, but maybe it has since been reopened?
- rendall 5y agoThis 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.
- minhmeoke 5y agoYes, it seems like many of the railway lines featured in this article followed the path of the Taurus Express (basically an extension of the famous Simplon Orient Express) and were once promoted to European tourists as a safe, comfortable way to visit the sights of the Middle East. Many posters even featured Wagons-Lits (a sleeper and dining car provider analogous to the Pullman Company in the United States) which were the epitome of luxury travel at that time. The posters from that bygone era are quite impressive and enticing, hopefully peace will return to the region sometime soon: https://retours.eu/en/51-taurus-express-iraq-egypt/ https://retours.eu/en/51-taurus-express-iraq-egypt/
- nmridul 5y agoThe trains between India and Pakistan also runs regular during peacetime and gets suspended on first indication of conflict. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samjhauta_Express https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samjhauta_Express
- brnt 5y ago(FYI, there are many more Tripolis. It's not a very distinctive name.)
- inglor_cz 5y ago
- photochemsyn 5y agoSome historians point to the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway (barely mentioned in the article) as playing a primary role in the outbreak of World War I. The naval forces of Britain had made the decision to switch from coal to oil, and that mean Britain would have a more maneuverable and faster fleet than Germany - so Germany followed suit. Unlike British sea access to Persian oil at the time, the only German option was transport of oil from Mesopotamia via the Berlin to Baghdad railway. Here's a pretty comprehensive discussion of the history, which actually points to World War One being initiated as the first of many wars by colonial powers over control of Middle Eastern oil: > "By 1912, German industry and government realized that oil was the fuel of its economic future and similarly to Britain it needed a supply of its own that would reduce their import dependency. Upon discovering more fields between Mosul and Baghdad where the last part of the rail link would go led to further potential friction with Britain and the necessity to protect its interests in the areas that surrounded the link which the Deutsche Bank negotiated in the same year. This would’ve provided the German government with an overland route to ship the oil out of Mesopatamia without the need to confront the British over Kuwait." [1] [1] https://carlcymrushistoryblog.wordpress.com/2014/04/18/the-berlin-baghdad-railway-and-the-outbreak-of-world-war-one/ https://carlcymrushistoryblog.wordpress.com/2014/04/18/the-b...
- pjc50 5y agoYes - and a similar story plays out in WW2, as Germany still didn't have any domestic oil. Hence the push east towards the oilfields of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, halted at the Volga (Stalingrad) and the Terek river/Caucasus mountains. I should get round to reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prize:_The_Epic_Quest_for_Oil,_Money,_and_Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prize:_The_Epic_Quest_for_...
- breckenedge 5y agoThat’s fascinating, I hadn’t come across that. Britain must have needed a ridiculous amount of oil as they were also importing from Mexico at the time. According to Tuchman’s The Zimmerman Telegram, Mexican oil is one of the big reasons that Germany tried to form an alliance with Mexico. Cutting off that oil would have hindered their navy.
- aaron695 5y ago
- beebeepka 5y agoWhat a sad, sad read. Kind of makes my blood boil, too. We've barely started but half the comments are already grey. As a side note: anyone else wonder why the English speaking world refers to the region as "the middle East"? To me it is the near East. Not just because of proximity but I've never heard or read about a near East from anglo sources. What is the rationale?
- meitham 5y agoI have recently seen a campaign in Middle Eastern media to rename the region to West Asia, probably for similar reasons to what you mentioned.
- pjc50 5y agoBy contrast with the "far east", which is everywhere east of India. I think if someone said "near east" I'd interpret it as roughly the Balkans: Vienna to the Bosporous. No longer as politically important a region.
- kmlx 5y agohere you go: > The origin of the term "Middle East" is considered to be in the British India Office during the 1850s. It was popularized by Alfred Thayer Mahan, an American naval strategist who was referring to the region between Arabia and India in 1902. Mahan’s definition of the Middle East was the area around the Persian Gulf. Sir Ignatius Valentine Chirol further enlarged this definition to cater for the Asian regions whose territories extended to India. > Prior to the Second World War, another term, the "Near East", denoted the eastern shores of the Mediterranean in addition to regions centered around Turkey. Middle East was used by the British while naming its command in Egypt in the late 1930s. It was after this usage that the term became widely used in the West. In 1946, the Middle East Institute began operating in Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States.
- mr_toad 5y agoThe ‘near’ east used to refer to the eastern reaches of the (former) Roman Empire: Syria, Palestine and Egypt. It is a little bit obsolete.
- oaiey 5y agoBloody British. Just think how many died building them. Great achievement and good progress. But it came with a price.
- bencollier49 5y agoSource?
- timthorn 5y agoIn the UK, about 500 navvies a year died building the railways here. Even recently, 10 workers were killed during the construction of the Channel Tunnel: https://www.railwaymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/navvies-workers-who-built-railways https://www.railwaymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/navvies...
- dustintrex 5y ago> In 2019 Egypt paved over its Victorian tramway between downtown Cairo and the suburb of Heliopolis. In fairness, that's also because Cairo Metro Line 3 was extended to Heliopolis in the same year. The Cairo Metro, while vastly inadequate for the city's size, is still the largest, busiest and fastest-growing metro in all Africa.