The Hejaz Railway historical background

In 1900 Sultan Abdul Hamid of Turkey (1842-1918), the last Caliph, Head of Ottoman Empire, worried by rumblings of Arab discontent, initiated a plan to strenghten the Ottoman hold. The scheme, masterminded by his second secretary Izzet Pasha, was to build the Hejaz railway from Damascus to the Holy cities of Medina and Makkah. So, with the declared aim of facilitating the transport of pilgrims, he appealed to the Muslim world for funds. It was built at a cost of L3 million under the direction ot the German engineer Heinrich Meissner, and by 1st September, 1908, the anniversary of the Sultan's accession, it was completed as far as Medina. Although the railway did indeed carry many thousands of pilgrims, it was also a means of moving Turkish troops easily into the heart of Arabia and consolidated the Turkish hold in western Arabia.

From the engineering point of view, building the railway presented few problems in the Hejaz, as it ran over plains and desert and wound between the hills, following the pilgrim's way and the old incense route. The weather, from searing sun and sand storms to unpredictable storms and flash floods, did present a serious hazard. The railway had to be raised on an embankment with over 2,000 bridges and culverts to prevent it being buried in sand or washed away in a flood. However the greatest problem was the hostility of the Arab tribes, who resented the presence of the Christian surveyors, engineers, foremen and labourers too. Not only did they see the railway as an infidel intrusion, but also as a serious threat to their income. Raids on the annual pilgrim caravans was a way of life, which the railway would seriously jeopardize. So railway working parties were constantly under attack from armed bedouin.

All services of the Turkish Forces were mobilised to supply the best workforce; 7,000 men were assigned to the earthwork and the laying of sleepers and rails. Masons from Damascus who for centuries were accustomed to this type of work, achieved an extremely high quality in both appearance and strenght of culverts, bridges, forts for 25 men every 20 km and barracks for 100 men. Lava and limestones were beautifully trimmed. Their achievements are still visible today along the rail bed, echoing their skills and craftsmanchip in line with the sturdy caravanserais which they produced earlier on the same Damascus-Makkah route.

When the building speed was considered to be too slow, Paul Gaudin, a French engineer, was assigned to the project of improving the logistics of the building site which was 500 km from the Damascus base . The main issue was to motivate the workforce and thus accelerate the work speed by giving an incentive to officers and men according to their production. In August 1908 a party of foreign journalists was invited to an inauguration trip from Damascus to Madinah, three days and three nights for a distance of 1,302 km across the Hejaz, (instead of two months formerly), with a maximum speed of 60 km an hour.

What happened between the Turkish-European pride of the 1908 inauguration and the closure of the trafic in 1924 ? In 1914 the Allied Forces were engaged in a fratricide war with imperial Germany. The Young Turks in power in 1909 onwards favoured siding with their German partners. The British, the French and the Arabs of Hejaz favoured keeping the Turks and Germans away from the Suez Canal. Sherif Hussein, the Hashemite king, and his sons Ali, Abdallah and Faisal, General Allenby, T.E. Lawrence, Col. Bremond, Capt. Pisani - the French artillery officer - were all figureheads of the Hejaz operations.

T.E. Lawrence, the archaeologist devoted to Syrian antiquities turned desert warlord, conceived guerrila tactics approved by Her Majesty's Arab Bureau in Cairo at the Spring of 1917. According to "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom", Turkish trains were ambushed on March 29, at Abu Naam and on April 5, 1917 at km 1,121 north of Muduraj. Then T.E. Lawrence focused on Damascus and left the containment of the Turks in their Madinah and Al Ula strongholds to his Arab, British and French partners.

From early 1917 until the fall of Damascus in 1918, Arabs continued to disrupt the railway - without putting it out of action entirely - assisted by the Allies, including men expert in demolition and explosives, such as Garland and also Lawrence, whose affinity with and commitment to the Arab cause was profound. Thereby they kept the maximum number of Turks relatively helpless and distracted from their prime garrisoning and defensive role.

After the war, the railway continued to operate spasmodically, but political turmoil in the Hejaz, the cost of repairs due to continual rain and storm damage, and competition from road made it uneconomic to repair and maintain.

Two attempts were made by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the sixties and the seventies to rebuild the track using a Japanese company, starting from Madinah and later a British and Spanish company starting from Jordan. What is left from these attempts are derelict yellow trucks from Bir Nasif to Abu Taqah and different building techniques, concrete pipes instead of stone culverts in the south and wooden railway sleepers from Australia in the north.

The six-day war of 1967 and accumulation of financial and construction problems only foiled the revival of the line, considering also that airlines and road transportation now adequately cope with the three million pilgrims arriving in Makkah during the Haj period.

Today, almost none of the steel rails or the sleepers remain, the latter having long since been used by local people as fuel, fencing and props, and the former sold for scrap. Yet much of the embankment and all the culverts and bridges are still there.

Still standing impressively every 20 kilometres or so are the stations, water towers and Turkish barracks and forts. The forts are sturdily built of sandstone or black basalt with external windows serving as gun slits. The double water towers with their stone shield against sniper fire, together with the garrison buildings, occur every three or four stations.

As well as the steam locomotive standing in the repair workshop at the station at Medain' Saleh, there are still derailed locomotives, coal tenders and wagons to be seen at Tuwayrah, Wayban, Hadiyah and Al Buwayr stations.

At Al Mudaraj, are Turkish graves, presumably those of the soldiers who died when Lawrence and his bedouin blew up a double-engined train, between here and Hadiyah. Lawrence has recorded: "Accordingly, when the front "driver" of the second engine was on the bridge, I raised my hand to Salem. There followed a terrific roar, and the line vanished from sight behind a spouting column of black dust and smoke a hundred feet high and wide."