Lawrence’s hated ‘Iron Camel’ limps into retirement
By Harry de Quetteville
DAMASCUS.- It survived sabotage attempts by T E Lawrence and bands of Bedouin tribesmen, but after a century of transporting passengers across Arabia, the celebrated Hijaz railway appears to have reached the end of the line.
Built in 1900 to link Damascus with the Muslim holy city of Medina, its 1,000 miles of track was long-regarded as the zenith of Ottoman power and engineering skill. In the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, a white-robed Peter O’Toole leads Arab tribes in attacks on the railway as it ferries Ottoman troops to the fronts of the First World War.
Today, however, the magnificent rolling stock that once included the sultan’s personal railway car, resplendent with wood panelling and plush armchairs, has been reduced to a single dilapidated railway carriage. All that remains open of the original line is a truncated section from Damascus to the Jordanian capital, Amman and even that is facing the axe.
Jordanian officials have complained that the “tedious and snail-paced” service has become financially unsustainable, and the railway that both Lawrence and the Ottomans once considered crucial looks set to close forever.
In Damascus, Syrian officials say that the journey – which takes only couple of hours by car but is a day-long test of endurance by rail – has been shunned by all but a handful of passengers.
“It’s very old and not many people use it now,” said Adnan Ebesh, the deputy manager of the Hijaz Railways. “In the past we used to run more trains on this line but now we use it for goods mostly.”
The Hijaz, named after the north-west section of the Saudi peninsula that was its ultimate destination, opened in 1908 after 6,000 Ottoman navvies struggled in searing heat and shifting desert sands to get it laid. In its heyday, it ferried pilgrims to Medina in modern-day Saudi Arabia, shortening the desert journey once made by camel from two months to a mere 55 hours.
The new mechanised pilgrimage became known as the “Women’s pilgrimage” – for those not up to the rigours of the more traditional voyage. But to the desert Bedouin tribes that lost the pilgrims’ custom the so-called “Iron Camel” became a source of resentment and financial ruin.
They were the first to target the railway line, with one uprising in 1910 brutally suppressed by the Ottomans after a tribe robbed and killed passengers on one train, and ripped up a section of the track. Lawrence then capitalised on Bedouin resentment of the railway to lead them in an audacious campaign of sabotage during the First World War. By then, pilgrims using the line were far outnumbered by Ottoman troops, deployed to the Arabian peninsula.
Such was Lawrence’s accuracy with explosives that the price of tickets for seats at the back of the train, away from the locomotive, was said to have cost several times more than those at the front. The wrecks of locomotives still lie near sections of long abandoned track in Saudi Arabia.
In Damascus, the landmark Hijaz station, with its stain glass windows, is also in mothballs. The tracks that once stretched into the distance behind it have been ripped up, and now books are sold in the area in front of the shuttered ticket counters.
The last of the Hijaz trains leave from a station a few miles outside the centre of Damascus, where Majid
Mattar, the station manager, sells tickets for about £2. “People can look at the view on the train, they can relax and have a picnic,” he said. Haitham Mohamed, a regular passenger, said: ”It’s cheaper and more fun than the car.”
But while Mr Mattar boasted that the train took a mere “four to five hours”, in practice the diesel engine that has replaced the steam locomotives of yesteryear usually takes about twice that. A typical journey from Damascus to Amman now takes up to 12 hours.
“We left at eight in the morning and arrived at about 5pm,” said Anne McMullan, from Belfast, who took the trip this week. “It blew the horn almost the whole time to warn people off the track. Once a whole market had to move off as we came through.
“I can see that it’s very expensive to run it for so few people but it will be a terrible shame to close it completely.”
The source: The Telegraph (London).