Railway lines once connected the Middle East

This 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&#x27;re mourning these trains, we also mourn the loss of peace and stability in the region.<p>As an aside, TIL that there are actually <i>two</i> Tripolis, one in Libya and the other in Lebanon.<p>I have heard references to an ancient, historical <i>Tripoli</i> for years, even in the lyrics of <i>Onward, Christian Soldier</i>. I only knew about the Libyan city and thought the article was mistaken when it referred to &quot;Tripoli, Beirut and Haifa&quot; together as Levantine ports, but &quot;The last train left Tripoli for Beirut at the start of Lebanon’s civil war in 1975&quot; 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.

At 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.<p>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.<p>It doesn&#x27;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.

Some 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.<p>Here&#x27;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:<p>&gt; &quot;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.&quot; [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;carlcymrushistoryblog.wordpress.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;18&#x2F;the-berlin-baghdad-railway-and-the-outbreak-of-world-war-one&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;carlcymrushistoryblog.wordpress.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;18&#x2F;the-b...</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.fo&#x2F;axzOJ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.fo&#x2F;axzOJ</a> and so sad.<p>I love watching the landscape roll past the train window.

&gt; In 2019 Egypt paved over its Victorian tramway between downtown Cairo and the suburb of Heliopolis.<p>In fairness, that&#x27;s also because Cairo Metro Line 3 was extended to Heliopolis in the same year.<p>The Cairo Metro, while vastly inadequate for the city&#x27;s size, is still the largest, busiest and fastest-growing metro in all Africa.

What a sad, sad read. Kind of makes my blood boil, too. We&#x27;ve barely started but half the comments are already grey.<p>As a side note: anyone else wonder why the English speaking world refers to the region as &quot;the middle East&quot;? To me it is the near East. Not just because of proximity but I&#x27;ve never heard or read about a near East from anglo sources. What is the rationale?

We really need to eliminate car dependence in our cities.

What an incredibly sad read.

Just 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.<p>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.

The article is good but since when is Algeria on the Red Sea?

Bloody British. Just think how many died building them.<p>Great achievement and good progress. But it came with a price.