Sharp morning light streams through stained glass windows, splashing colour across the stone floor like paint on canvas. The waiting room is open, airy, with an ornate wooden balcony tracing the walls half way up. In one corner is a vintage switchboard and behind it are two booths, closed with cast iron but still proudly proclaiming: Billets et Bagages.
“If you’re looking for a train, you’re in the wrong place,” says an old man from the corner, smiling. And he is correct, of course, because although this is the grand Hejaz Railway Station in downtown Damascus, it no longer has either purpose or passengers. Today the space stands frozen as a snapshot of a time long gone; a living museum to a dream never quite fulfilled.
Just over a century ago it was possible to leave the Syrian capital by train and roll south, heading for the Holy City of Medina. To the north, the line connected all the way to Istanbul and the edge of Europe.
The Ottoman Sultan called it the Hejaz Railway, after the mountainous, arid region along the Red Sea, and the laying of more than 1,300 kilometers of narrow-gauge track at the dawn of the twentieth century fastened together a new vision for the Middle East.
The railway was touted as a way to improve the journey for pilgrims to Medina and Mecca, but it was also important for bolstering Ottoman defenses against threats from the French and British in the region. A branch line connected to the Mediterranean at Haifa. In 1908, upon opening, the project was christened the ‘Iron Silk Road’ for the economic opportunity and security it promised.
For a decade the railway carried pilgrims, soldiers and other early travellers, but it was never able to fully live up to the ambition. By 1917 large sections lay in ruins, blown up by Arab tribes and British soldiers during WWI and the Great Arab Revolt, when the Hashemites rose up against the Ottomans. In the decades since, the project’s fortunes have continued to dwindle. The last train in what is now Saudi Arabia departed in 1925, although up until 2011 the route from Damascus to the Jordanian capital, Amman, was still operational.
The Hejaz Railway line was always considered special in Syria, says Muhammad Arar, a French language teacher from Damascus. “People came to Damascus to begin their sacred journeys for Hajj, and the railway was an important development,” he tells Esquire Middle East. Its construction largely followed the route of the camel caravan, and turned an arduous 40-day journey to Medina – one-way – into a much more manageable three or four. Plans to extend to Mecca were eventually abandoned to allow the Bedouin to continue their business of escorting pilgrims into the city.
Reports from the time suggest that, while there was vast improvement on the overland pilgrimage, conditions for travellers still left much to be desired, and schedules were far from reliable. Author James Nicholson, who has written extensively about the railway, notes how, in 1909, British Lieutenant-Colonel Mark Sykes met a train coming from Damascus while he was on camel and, “stopped for a chat, the engine driver salaaming just as he would have been as riding a donkey.” Much changed in the following decades, but perhaps not everything. Ehssen Wadi, a retired train conductor, remembers slowing down the locomotive so that passengers could reach out to gather figs and apricots from alongside the track. “Sometimes,” he says, “we’d stop completely.”
I spent three months following the Hejaz Railway to learn about its legacy, and stuck as close to the route as was possible given contemporary realities. Many Syrians I met had happy memories of the atmosphere aboard the trains. This is one of the beauties of train travel, of course; for strangers to be thrown together in a communal space, where the gentle rhythm of movement encourages conversation. “Each carriage was its own little world of kindness and courtesy,” remembers Wadi. “Unique communities brought together, every time the train left the station.” Such days of easy camaraderie in Syria are missed now for so many reasons. The conflict in the country affected the railways as it did everything else. At the time of writing just one local service in Aleppo and a limited coastal route are all that remain operational of Syria’s broader network.
Fawzi Al-Khazali still remembers the last train to arrive from Syria. I find him in the shade of the station he manages at Mafraq in northern Jordan; two stories of resplendent hand-cut stone with a red tiled roof. An iron housing protrudes from the wall where the old bell used to hang, and on the gable wall is the name, ornately carved by an Ottoman calligrapher. “People loved it,” says Al-Khazali of the cross-border passenger service, which in latter years was primarily used for tourist trips. “Amman and Damascus are so close when you think about it.” He recalls receiving a message in 2011 from his Syrian colleagues to say there had been an explosion close to the track. “We thought it would be a few weeks and things would return to normal.” Now it’s been 13 years. “It’s so sad, because there
was movement and life back then.”
From Mafraq the railway winds through rolling green hills and across long, arched century-old bridges. At the city of Zarqa it is swallowed by gray urban sprawl which leads all the way to the capital, Amman. Early photographs of railway construction there show bare hillsides, a free flowing river, and a few small homes made by Circassian settlers. Now it is a concrete jungle, home to four million people, with even the river covered by a highway.
The railway is designated as waqf – a religious endowment – meaning it cannot be sold or removed, and it is managed by the Jordan Hejaz Railway Corporation (JHR). When I arrive at Amman station Husam Khariesha, who wears a leather conductor’s hat, takes me by the arm and ushers me into the original workshop for a tour. “We have eight locomotives,” he says, excitedly. Most are diesel, but there is also a steam engine, now used only on special
occasions. Over the next hour, he explains at length about various pipes, rods, levers and valves, no details of which I comprehend. What is clear is that it’s very complicated. Khariesha first started coming to watch the mechanics at 14 years old and has worked for
the railway ever since. Thirty years later, he is chief engineer. “I love trains,” he says. “I dream about them. And here in Jordan trains are part of our heritage. This is our oldest organization. We must hold onto it.”
From spring to autumn the JHR runs a trip from Amman to Giza station, close to the international airport. It is the last section of the original Hejaz open to the public. Khariesha is keen to take one of the diesel locomotives for a test run before tourist season starts. So, on an overcast afternoon, my friend and colleague Paul Hijazin and I board a wooden carriage, and are pulled out into the city.
The locomotive takes us between housing blocks and alongside streets, then over a two-tiered Ottoman bridge. Even for Paul, a Jordanian who lives in Amman, the perspective of his city is completely new. At the many intersections where the road networks crosses the track, a JHR employee works the horn while colleagues peer out looking for cars, children, animals, or anything else that might get in the way. The sound is deafening and our pace is slow – a galloping horse or good bicycle could probably leave us for dust. But our presence also makes passers-by happy. Kids wave, and old men and women smile. Teenagers take selfies. Modern Amman has grown around the route of the Hejaz and so it is woven into the fabric of the city, and yet to see a train pass by is still a novelty.
“We have nine major stations in the country, and 20 small ones,” the Director-General of JHR, Zahi Khalil, tells me. There are employees in every station as far as Ma’an in the south of the country and, each day, the integrity of the rails is checked using small cars that have been converted to roll along the tracks.
“We want to rehabilitate the line and make it better for both passengers and freight,” says Khalil. “The first step is a fast line between Zarqa and Giza in five years.” The idea sounds nice but there are no shortage of challenges. South of Giza, where Paul and I continue on foot and by car, is Qatrana. Mansour Al- Bazaina, the station master, walks with us along the tracks. “Look, everywhere the iron has been lifted by people looking for gold,” says Al-Bazaina. “They drive us crazy.” There is a popular idea that the Ottomans buried gold under or around the railway when they left during the Arab Revolt. Now Jordanians, and others from the wider region, come to search for forgotten treasure, some with maps from Turkey purporting to show its location.
In 1920 Emir Abdullah, second son of Sherif Hussein who led the Great Arab Revolt, arrived in Ma’an by train in 1920 and, a year later, he established the Emirate of Transjordan. When Husam Khariesha and others talk of the railway being intrinsically tied to the genesis of their country, this is what they mean; the train delivered the man who would establish the Kingdom, and it was a building at the station at Ma’an which became his first Palace. Now it has been refurbished, with polished stone and replica roof tiles and a landscaped garden. In this space, recently opened as a museum, it’s almost possible to imagine its heyday; the grandeur, bustle and innovation.
Enshrining that feels even more important as I move south, because once past an area called Batn Al-Ghoul the rails disappear, leaving only a raised embankment. Station floors have been dug out by excavators and walls pulled apart, all in the hunt for treasure. I cross the border into Saudi Arabia and find the same there. In recent years fences have been erected around stations, but most have been cut open and are unstaffed. To follow the route through Saudi Arabia is to witness the gradual decline of these once striking buildings, each looking like a faded and battered postcard image from a better time.
The Hejaz landscape is dramatic, with low, gnawed hills and wide, dimpled wadis. Everything comes to life in the margins of the day, bathed in golden light, and vivid greens in the riverbeds pop against crimson sandstone. But in the middle of the day it is torturous to be out and even the few camel herders I meet, usually Egyptian or Sudanese, seek shade under Acacia trees. I think often of the workers who laid the rails, and the desperate conditions they must have faced.
The status of the railway in Saudi Arabia is unclear. The station at Tabuk has been converted into a small museum, though there are few artifacts and even fewer visitors. In Al Ula, an oasis town at the centre of the grand vision to transform the Kingdom culturally and economically by 2030, the railway is earmarked in the strategic masterplan for development. But on the ground little seems to be happening, even as the surrounding areas evolve rapidly. The station at Medain Saleh, close to the magnificent rock-cut Nabatean site at Hegra, is being transformed in a different way, into a luxury hotel.
Perhaps one reason is that the railway’s legacy in Saudi Arabia, as the enterprise of a foreign power at a time when the region was considered an ungovernable backwater, is simply not so relevant for a Kingdom actively rewriting its own narrative. And even if the stations at Al Ula are revived, and if the grand terminus in Medina does open to the public as a museum as planned, it does not seem feasible or practical that the rest of the route will ever be anything other than a line in the sand.
A project called the India – Middle East – Europe Economic Corridor is one way the original ambition may endure in another manner. The IMEC plans to connect the named regions via shipping and rail networks, and to act as a counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The name of the Hejaz has been invoked in proposals for the railway component, which would join Saudi Arabia through Jordan to Israel, although plans have stalled since the Israeli bombardment of Gaza began.
To many that I spoke to, the Hejaz project represented a time when borders were more fluid, and the region felt connected. An older generation talks of Amman, Damascus, Beirut and even Jerusalem being reachable in a weekend of travelling. Now movement between those places in any manner is challenging at best, impossible for many. Muhammad Arar in Damascus sums up the nostalgia and melancholy that I heard so frequently. “The Hejaz Railway has so many elements of our identity embedded within it. My city was the gateway to heaven. I miss those days.”
The forthcoming book ‘From Damascus to Medina: A Journey Along the Lost Hejaz Railway’ will be published by Corsair in 2026. The reporting for this story was made with the support of the Abraham Path Initiative, and contributions from Mohammed Al Zaidawi.