Inaugurated on August 4, 1895, the Beirut-Damascus railroad became the first major railway in the Levant, preceding the more famous Hijaz Railway by 13 years. The winding, 147-kilometer route took the steam engines just nine hours.
The builders addressed the challenge of the mountains by laying narrow-gauge tracks 1,050 millimeters apart. Where the track became too steep for the iron wheels to keep their grip, they laid a third, toothed rail in the center, with which the locomotive’s rack-and-pinion cog system could mesh and provide mechanical traction.
The civil war in Lebanon in the 1970s brought a halt to the traffic and the track and rolling stock has been neglected since.
In a region that has seen more conflict than stability in the past half century, restoring a historical railroad could seem superfluous. Yet following the August 2020 Beirut port catastrophe, discussions about the railroad may have a new chance.
“There is now an opportunity to rebuild the port of Beirut in a better way,” says Yarob Badr, Regional Advisor for Transport and Logistics at the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. “There is a need to consider railway connectivity in the port of Beirut which is now missing.”
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