Historic track comes to life
15 December 2013
JEDDAH – Railways are not a common feature in the Saudi landscape. Recent projects including the Haramain Railway, the east-west and north-south lines and metro projects notwithstanding, the harsh conditions of the desert as well as the country’s vast size make railways not the optimum way of transportation in a time of budget airlines and motorways.
That makes the historic 1000-mile Hejaz Railway all the more intriguing. The railway, which ran between Damascus and Madinah, comes alive again in James Nicholson’s book ‘The Hejaz Railway’, originally published in 2005. Nicholson, who lives in Riyadh and works as an English language instructor for BAE Systems, recently visited the Hejaz twice to talk about his book and sell signed copies of it.
Speaking to the Saudi Gazette, Nicholson said the first real reason he decided to write the book came up following a trip to the Nabatean tombs at Mada’in Saleh, which lies along the old railway track, with his family and some friends. “The last afternoon, we had an afternoon free and my brother suggested going up the railway a bit off-road, and it was fantastic!” Apart from the spectacular mountain scenery, they witnessed “old stations still sitting in the desert as they were left in early 1920s” as well as “various bits of rolling stock lined by the side of the rail.
“I thought it was fantastic and obviously knew about the Lawrence story and a bit of the history,” so Nicholson decided that once he had returned to Riyadh he would buy a book on the subject. “I was amazed to find that there wasn’t one.”
Keen to fill this “gap in the market”, Nicholson approached a publisher in London. “They were happy to give me the go-ahead,” he related, admitting that while writing the book, it was “comforting to know it was going to be published”.
Ordered in 1900 by the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Abdulhamid II, and constructed in only 8 years, the nearly 1000-mile railway is an “extraordinary feat of engineering and endurance” that tragically lasted a short 6 years, until the First World War broke out in 1914. From that moment, the railway and its use became of strategic importance for the Arab revolt against the Turks, but the chunk that later became part of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been abandoned ever since the end of the war.
“A lot of people realize the relevance of the Hejaz Railway” during the First World War, “but before that, it was a huge engineering achievement to build a 1500-kilometer railway in 8 years,” commented British Consul General Mohammed Shokat, who hosted one of the talks in Jeddah, indicating the apt timing of the talk at the consulate nearly 100 years after the start of the “Great War” and at a time of construction of numerous railways in the Kingdom.
The Hejaz Railway perhaps owes its fame to the British army officer T.E. Lawrence and the 1962 David Lean film ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, but, as James Nicholson writes in the preface of his book, “it is also the case that without the Hejaz Railway there may never have been a ‘Lawrence of Arabia’”, as it is “hard to imagine how his story could have developed in quite the same way had he been ambushing tanks or digging trenches in the sand”.
Nicholson, who was born in 1956 in Bournemouth and holds a Master’s Degree in Linguistics from Surrey University, spent 2 years researching and 1.5 years writing the book. “I was working full time at the same time, so it was done weekends and on holidays and evenings.”
Although the size and colorful photographs may give it the look of a coffee-table book, ‘The Hejaz Railway’ is in fact a thorough and precise account of the construction and running of the railway as well as its significance during the War. “There were two sides [to the research]: Going up the railway and looking at the stations and taking photographs” in Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan was one of them. In the Kingdom as well as the south of Jordan, following the railway meant checking maps, taking GPS readings and moving “down into 4-wheel drive”, heading out “across the wide broken bed of the desert valley”, Nicholson writes in his book. The rest of Jordan and Syria was done by car along the tarmac road and even partly by train, which until the recent troubles still ran between Amman and Damascus.
The other side was the research done in London at various universities and archives. Particularly useful was the correspondence between the British consul in Damascus, W. Richards, and Sir Nicolas O’Conor, the ambassador in Constantinople – present-day Istanbul. The British consul “wrote a sort of monthly report; the British were very suspicious, and they wanted to assure it was only a pilgrim line, not a military one, whether it was intended to bypass the Suez Canal” – which the British controlled – and “whether it was going to put pressure on Cairo and the route to India. That was a wealth of information,” Nicholson related.
Ironically, Richards initially did not even believe the Turks would construct such a long railway and “failed to report on a proposed scheme to build a railway line from Damascus to Makkah”, Nicholson writes in his introduction. Later, the consul justified his neglect in passing on the rumors that had been circulating in Damascus “by pointing out that the venture ‘seemed to me and others so wildly improbable, not to say fantastic, that I refrained from reporting on it to your Excellency’”.
The railway was indeed quite a ‘fantastic’ scheme: the harsh landscape consisting of volcanic rocks and vast stretches of sand as well as extreme temperatures and droughts made the project a challenging one.
Apart from the drift sand, a major challenge was the water. As the Western region of Saudi Arabia witnessed in recent years, it doesn’t rain much but when it rains it pours. “Wadis that remained dry for years at a time could become surging boulder-strewn torrents in a matter of hours when the rains finally fell,” Nicholson accurately points out.
It is at least remarkable that a fading empire, torn by economic and political evils and on the verge of bankruptcy, was able to carry out such a scheme. This can be partly explained by the almost complete absence of corruption as well as the promotion of the railway as an Islamic undertaking, aimed at facilitating the pilgrims travelling to the holy sites in Makkah and Madinah. A special fund was set up for people to contribute to the project, and nearly a third of the cost could be met by donations.
While the religious factor was important – the track reduced the hazardous 40-day journey to Madinah on camel, donkey, or even on feet to a safer and cheaper 4-day ride – it was not the only one. “It did have a military purpose: the Ottomans were trying to hold their power over the Hejaz and the holy cities,” Nicholson noted.
It also had an economic purpose. “There was quite a lot of trading, especially in the northern parts, in Damascus, and [the railway] had an outlet on the Red Sea at Haifa. There was quite a lot of agricultural export, so it had a financial side, but the main reason was a pilgrim railway.”
While Nicholson thinks it is unlikely the Hejaz Railway will ever be restored for use of pilgrims coming to Saudi Arabia, several stations – in Madinah, Tabuk and Mada’in Saleh – have been renovated by the Deputy Ministry for Antiquities and Museums for tourism purposes. Other stations and locomotives have been fenced off to prevent vandalism, but it is unclear if the authorities have any plans to restore them or build any amenities to promote tourism in the area. Until then, “the spectacular mountain scenery together with the old Ottoman’s stations and the occasional piece of abandoned rolling stock makes the railway an unbeatable off-road destination.”
http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index...20131214189476 Hejaz Railway Madinah historic importance view
as a trade and Hajj route سكة حديد الحجاز شاهد تاريخي على أهمية المدينة المنورة كطريق للتجارة والحج (واس) 8/9/1434 هـ 
