This article made me think about how the presence of trains indicate peace. Trains are so vulnerable to attack. Their existence depends on everyone with access to the tracks to trust and agree with their purpose. I suspect if we're mourning these trains, we also mourn the loss of peace and stability in the region.
As an aside, TIL that there are actually two Tripolis, one in Libya and the other in Lebanon.
I have heard references to an ancient, historical Tripoli for years, even in the lyrics of Onward, Christian Soldier. I only knew about the Libyan city and thought the article was mistaken when it referred to "Tripoli, Beirut and Haifa" together as Levantine ports, but "The last train left Tripoli for Beirut at the start of Lebanon’s civil war in 1975" tipped me off that my geography was off, since a train from Libya to Lebanon would not have been possible after Israel closed her borders.
> This article made me think about how the presence of trains indicate peace. Trains are so vulnerable to attack. Their existence depends on everyone with access to the tracks to trust and agree with their purpose. I suspect if we're mourning these trains, we also mourn the loss of peace and stability in the region.
Trains can also indicate war :) They are crucial for logistics, and were especially so before WW2. My country uses European gauge rails despite starting with Russian gauge rails because during WW1 Germany occupied big parts of it and switched the gauge to incorporate it in their WW1 supply train.
BTW you could deduce if some country wanted to invade the other or defend itself by looking at the rails and roads they invest in - if the lines go along the border they are more likely to defend, if the lines go perpendicular to the border - they are more likely to attack.
For the curious, Russian gauge is/was 5 ft (1,524 mm) and standard gauge is 4 ft 8 1⁄2 in (1,435 mm). Soviets eventually redefined it to a round metric number (1,520 mm), but that's a very small difference. Track width varies by around a centimeter normally.
Russian and Soviet rail profile tend to be bigger (taller by maybe an inch) but that doesn't really impact the trains aside from transitioning from one to the other.
Interestingly, 3.5 in happens to be almost the ideal change. The bottom of a normal rail profile is a bit over 6 in wide, so the new spike hole is right between the two old holes. If the difference was any larger or smaller, the new spike wouldn't hold as well.
There was some massive article about Russian logistics in WW2. It was indeed a big factor in a war. Invading a country with incompatible rails was a problem.
I recently visited the National Railway Museum in York, and they had an exhibition about hospital trains in Northern France during WWI. The British government discussed plans for train carriages and trains with train companies before war had even been declared, with the first deliveries to the port of Southampton taking place within the first few weeks of war being declared.
After the invention of heavy bomber aircraft by the end of WWI, railways became very vulnerable, and regular train traffic, to my mind, could only indicate peace time. It might be a preparation for a war, but not a war yet.
We had, in fact, three — we called the one in Libya Trablusgarp, Trablus of the West, and he one in Lebanon Trablusşam, Trablus of the Levant, and we call the only one that we have left in Anatolia, today's Turkey, Tirebolu. Just like hashes, given a large enough empire, name collisions are inevitable.
Yes, it seems like many of the railway lines featured in this article followed the path of the Taurus Express (basically an extension of the famous Simplon Orient Express) and were once promoted to European tourists as a safe, comfortable way to visit the sights of the Middle East. Many posters even featured Wagons-Lits (a sleeper and dining car provider analogous to the Pullman Company in the United States) which were the epitome of luxury travel at that time. The posters from that bygone era are quite impressive and enticing, hopefully peace will return to the region sometime soon:
I've ridden this trainline from Pyongyang to Beijing, although it was necessary to change trains after crossing the Yalu river and entering China at Dandong
To the contrary, the strategic importance of trains specifically caused the Great War, and basically plunged Europe into 40 years of total war conflict.
A tangent, but I’ve often pondered about the economic and societal value of other inanimate objects; for instance, what the economic benefit of a barricade has always fascinated and perplexed me.
One one hand, a barricade prevents free the movement of services and goods. On the other hand, without them there would be less security, leading to less economic activity.
This is similarly true of aircraft, which are immensely vulnerable to attack, and which typically don't overfly regions of conflict, as well as sea traffic, which is somewhat less vulnerable, but may be subject to closed access to specific routes, usually by way of canals. These differ from rail in that the routes are not typically quite so constrained. But as a general rule, commerce and trade rely on good relations.
In the case of aircraft, there have been a number of shoot-downs of civillian craft. Wikipedia lists at least 39 such incidents here, a starting number since 1980, contrasting to the argument that relations have become increasingly peaceable in recent decades.
One of the more notable instances of ships denied access to a shorter route was the case of the Russian navy's Baltic fleet in the Russo-Japanese war. After the Russian fleet After mistaking a British fishing fleet for Japanese torpedo boats in the North Sea, and sinking them in what is known as the Dogger Bank Incident, Britain denied Russia use of the Suez Canal (by some accounts). The Baltic fleet were forced to go the long way 'round, via the Cape of Good Hope and South Africa, and arrived in very poor condition (having dparted in not much better) and suffered a humilating defeat at the Battle of Tsushima which helped in part precipitate the failed 1905 Russian Revolution.
The logistical task of moving a coal-fired naval fleet around the world was formidible, with the Baltic fleet requiring forty coaling stops. The round-the-world tour of the US's own Great White Fleet shortly after (1907--9) was in part a tour de force of US claims on fueling and service ports along the route. The emergence of oil and nuclear-powered vessels was transformative to naval power, the former beginning with the British fleet immediately prior to the First World War, the latter during and after the Cold War, though largely limited to aircraft carriers and submarines.
Arguably, whales are another case in which long-distance mobility is enabled by attractive prospects at widely-sepatarted locations (krill and other feeding grounds), and a lack of any credible predators or enemies. The very largest whales are an evolutionarily modern development, having grown from smaller species largely inhabiting coastal waters. The emergence of a capable predator (humans) very nearly proved fatal to all great whale species.
Another transportation mode which existed in the Middle East was the Trans-Arabian pipeline. As with railroads, pipelines rely on safe passage along a land route. Most critically, the TAP crossed the Golan Heights, which came under Israeli control during the 1967 Six Day War.
And in the US, when highway construction was largely a local affair, wealthier cities and towns tended to ignore routes outside city limits, counties tended to ignore those extending beyond county lines, and states those which extended beyond their own boundaries. One of the benefits of a nationaly highway and interstate system (and there were national post roads and highways before the inauguration of the US Interstate Highway System in 1956) was in creating an overarching interest in a national transportation infrastructure, with commensurate planning and financing.
Even today, there are few boundary marks as evident as where one jurisdiction's highway work ends and another begins, particularly between wealthier and less-flush jurisdictions, be they towns, counties, or states. The demarcation is literally paved on the ground.
>Another transportation mode which existed in the Middle East was the Trans-Arabian pipeline....
As wiki points out, TAP kept running until 1976. Technology changed with supertankers, so Saudi decided to stop haggling over fees and not use it. Same thing for ME rail routes - they all required investment, and most ME countries had different priorities.
>My understanding is that TAP's significance ended largely with the 1967 war, though I'm not especially familiar with it.
The TAP stopped most operations because Saudi discovered they can use supertankers through international waters and pay much less in pipeline fees. The 1967 war may have actually given TAP a few years more - it closed the Suez canal for awhile, so tankers had to go the long way around. Suez reopened in June 1975 and soon after the Saudis stopped using TAP.
>Its existence does explain much of the strategic significance of Beruit (the pipeline's Mediterranean terminus) however.
TAP's terminus was at Sidon. As for Beirut, it was strategic for a different reason: The British Empire developed Haifa as a big Med port, but Arab state could not use it after Israel was founded; Beirut was the alternative for Haifa they could use.
not only peace. Given the investment and maintenance required, trains require some degree of social/economic connectedness between places it connects. For example, the fall of USSR resulted in many train routes disappearing, and in the recent years Russia/Ukraine transport connections naturally got hit.
At least in Israel, many of the old lines, even if they still operated today, would have been long obsolete. A daily train leaving Haifa at 8:30 and reaching Jaffa by lunch? Three, four hours? The same line today makes the journey in an hour, and there are plans on the table to build additional tracks to cut that down to a half hour. People commute from Haifa to Tel Aviv, with three (soon four) tracks passing through the Ayalon bottleneck.
Or, take the line to Jerusalem. The old line took a twisty, no-tunnels approach up the hills to Jerusalem that took hours. It was mostly only used to get out of the city in case snow blocked the main entrance, because it was so slow. The new line, with tunnels and bridges, cuts right through and makes the journey to Tel Aviv in an hour.
It doesn't really matter what the Ottomans or the British built, because it was built for a level of traffic of a largely rural, empty empire. It would never have met modern needs. As populations grew across the Middle East, even a Middle East at peace, all of these lines would have long been dismembered anyway, and replaced with lines designed to actually meet the transportation needs of the people who lived there.
True, but I think it's easier economically and politically to get from "aging 19th century network" to "modern network" because you can upgrade it piecemeal tackling the worst bits first, compared to starting from "basically no network".
Leaving the most pictoresque one in operation as a tourist magnet (not for daily commute) would definitely work, though. It works in many European countries, especially where the landscape is beautiful, and the Levant has no shortage of stunning landscapes.
The train station at Malha was closed 2020 because of COVID because it was a scenic/tourist route. There was discussion of shutting it down permanently but it didn't happen. I used to take it every week for a coding-teaching gig 5 years ago.
It will likely either reopen when tourism reaches a pre-covid level in a year or two or will be converted to a light-rail station.
Wow, never before have I met anyone with the same nick online. I have been carrying the Elvish name around since approx. 1995, when I was a young Tolkien fanboy.
This railway is on my visit list. I hope that tourism recovers enough for it to reopen.
Got mine from a Tolkien name generator around 2000 to create an online alias (after reading and liking a few books) and used it since. Used to have inglor.com and still have the gmail.
If you look hard enough you will find my contributions in early-mid newgrounds (inglor day, zombie inglor, the inglor dance and 10k bbs posts :))
It’s quite amazing there wasn’t a proper rail line connecting Tel Aviv and Jerusalem until very recently. Certainly the very mountainous terrain around Jerusalem makes it difficult but the Swiss have managed.
All the traffic between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv was via highway one, for quite some time. I was once told, that the rail network was neglected, out of fear that it would be vulnerable to terrorist attacks.
Yes, but they have buses instead, which are just as vulnerable. The bus connections from downtown Tel Aviv or Jerusalem to Ben Gurion airport were absolutely abysmal.
If the line would be operating today, it would have long been upgraded. It's kind of like saying if the line between Paris and London would still be operating, it would be obsolete. But since it was kept in operation, and demand was there, eventually Eurostar was built, doing the trip in 2-3h that was previously overnight.
Some historians point to the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway (barely mentioned in the article) as playing a primary role in the outbreak of World War I. The naval forces of Britain had made the decision to switch from coal to oil, and that mean Britain would have a more maneuverable and faster fleet than Germany - so Germany followed suit. Unlike British sea access to Persian oil at the time, the only German option was transport of oil from Mesopotamia via the Berlin to Baghdad railway.
Here's a pretty comprehensive discussion of the history, which actually points to World War One being initiated as the first of many wars by colonial powers over control of Middle Eastern oil:
> "By 1912, German industry and government realized that oil was the fuel of its economic future and similarly to Britain it needed a supply of its own that would reduce their import dependency. Upon discovering more fields between Mosul and Baghdad where the last part of the rail link would go led to further potential friction with Britain and the necessity to protect its interests in the areas that surrounded the link which the Deutsche Bank negotiated in the same year. This would’ve provided the German government with an overland route to ship the oil out of Mesopatamia without the need to confront the British over Kuwait." [1]
Linking World War I to an oil race between Germany and Britain is... really pushing it. To the extent that Anglo-German enmity played a major role in forming the alliance blocs pre-WWI, that is more because Kaiser Wilhelm canned Bismarck in favor of a more aggressive foreign policy that, quite frankly, pissed everybody else off, leading to German diplomatic isolation.
The idea that competition for oil was a major player in that is only viable if you ignore the minor fact that causes happen before actions. To summarize the underlying assertions: the Berlin-Baghdad railway, built in 1889, was needed to transport the new critical resource of oil from its discovery in the Ottoman Empire in 1908 for the insatiable demand of coal-fired dreadnoughts like HMS Dreadnought (1906). (Yes, coal-fired--as far as I'm aware, all of the German capital ships built or planned before or during WWI were primarily coal-fired. The decisive move from coal to oil happens largely at the tail end of WWI, way too late to be a major factory in strategic thinking to motivate foreign policy in the run up to WWI.)
Yes - and a similar story plays out in WW2, as Germany still didn't have any domestic oil. Hence the push east towards the oilfields of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, halted at the Volga (Stalingrad) and the Terek river/Caucasus mountains.
But “without the need to confront the British over Kuwait” seems to indicate that this railway project in itself was good for keeping peace because it decreased the conflict potential.
That’s fascinating, I hadn’t come across that. Britain must have needed a ridiculous amount of oil as they were also importing from Mexico at the time. According to Tuchman’s The Zimmerman Telegram, Mexican oil is one of the big reasons that Germany tried to form an alliance with Mexico. Cutting off that oil would have hindered their navy.
The British Navy was vastly more powerful and would have had little trouble blockading Mexico and sinking any German oil tankers.
The resources of colonial empires decided the victors of both world wars in my opinion.
What a sad, sad read. Kind of makes my blood boil, too. We've barely started but half the comments are already grey.
As a side note: anyone else wonder why the English speaking world refers to the region as "the middle East"? To me it is the near East. Not just because of proximity but I've never heard or read about a near East from anglo sources. What is the rationale?
> The origin of the term "Middle East" is considered to be in the British India Office during the 1850s. It was popularized by Alfred Thayer Mahan, an American naval strategist who was referring to the region between Arabia and India in 1902. Mahan’s definition of the Middle East was the area around the Persian Gulf. Sir Ignatius Valentine Chirol further enlarged this definition to cater for the Asian regions whose territories extended to India.
> Prior to the Second World War, another term, the "Near East", denoted the eastern shores of the Mediterranean in addition to regions centered around Turkey. Middle East was used by the British while naming its command in Egypt in the late 1930s. It was after this usage that the term became widely used in the West. In 1946, the Middle East Institute began operating in Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States.
By contrast with the "far east", which is everywhere east of India. I think if someone said "near east" I'd interpret it as roughly the Balkans: Vienna to the Bosporous. No longer as politically important a region.
Life is so much more enjoyable when you move away from the suburbs and get rid of your car. The freedom to just walk to your destination and having everything within walking range is priceless.
You can rent a car anytime you want to go on a longer excursion. It is far harder to rent walkability or access to amenities. You can’t rent “my children can walk to school and I can walk to pick them up for lunch” nearly as easily. Nor can you rent “it’s my buddy’s birthday and we wanted to go out on the town without a long car ride after”. Nor can you rent the physical benefits of movement to apply to your many car trips. Nor can you rent the climate benefits of the freedom to not take a car to do all of your errands.
A substantial portion of my childhood is 20-40 minute car rides punctuating every excursion, every new experience. Maybe it’s family time, but mostly I was on my Nintendo DS or GameBoy Color (or reading and getting carsick) and ignoring legs made restless from lack of use. Freedom has its price.
My colleague is an avid mountaineer. He has his gear in the trunk of his car at all times. After work, if the weather is nice, he drives to the mountains to go hiking. That would be very hard to do with a rental car.
You don’t lose any of that having neighbourhoods where you don’t need a car to pick up some milk. I don’t think we should ban private cars or anything, but when public schools have 3 lane car pickup lanes several blocks long there’s an issue.
My cousin's husband has been mugged three times in his life. Each time was when he was walking to school in NYC, each time was with a deadly weapon, and each time there was a chance he could have died. I've never heard of a single person being mugged driving to school.
I'm not saying this is the primary reason to have cars and live in the suburbs, but not being forced to share space with every random person in your vicinity is no small thing.
Where did I say everybody should be in something like nyc density? Even then, there are plenty of cities (especially outside America) where those safety concerns are virtually nonexistent.
I just turned 41 and my son turns one in January. I can think of a million reasons to leave the city and in fact my wife and I are strongly considering it, but the necessary reliance on cars in the suburbs is an enormous deterrent. I’ve lived that way before, so I know what’s bad about it. We are probably only going to consider walkable small towns (as opposed to car dependent exurbia).
Mmm don't sell it too short. Long distance passengers become non-drivers art least initially at either end. Good city-center stations will not have parking or rental cars nearby.
The conservative tendency to car apologia is really disappointing. For some reason, it's perceived to be consistent with the conservative worldview, but it isn't. Automobile supremacy requires massive social engineering and state intervention and car-based cities can only remain as such by artificially limiting homebuilding (and therefore density). If you set individuals free to build what the market demands they will create cities in which it's very unpleasant to drive (i.e. densely populated city centers) and those cities will need to solve the transportation problem some other way. The only way you can prevent that is to, well, literally prevent it -- i.e. make it illegal (via zoning).
It’s true that progressives are wild about transit, but I wish more conservatives resisted the urge to view cars as the natural political opposite.
Speak for yourself. The last thing I want during covid is to be stuck in a metal box with 100 strangers uncomfortably wearing masks instead of in my own car blasting music with the window down.
You still get to have your car, it just means you can't drive it right through the middle of a dense living area, you'll have to park on the edge and walk/tram/scooter in. Which is the best for everyone.
Except for those in a condition not to easily walk or use any kind of two wheels device.
Then there is the whole issue that local city transportation is pretty lousy, even in Europe.
Sure big cities have it good on the innermost district, live a bit more on the outskirts or in a smaller town and taxi becomes the only option for those not willing to wait between 1-2h for each bus into each direction plus additional commute.
Electric wheelchairs are likely the best option for the first group. Good thing is making an area better for walking makes it better for disabled people as well. A car centric area is extremely hostile for people with disabilities which make it difficult/illegal to drive.
I am all for improvements in such areas, unfortunately even in countries like Germany, there are plenty of local subway stations and local train ones where those requirements are just ignored.
There are cars specially tailored for people with disabilities, and electric wheelchairs are only practicable in sunny weather.
No one wants to wear rain pants. The point is that it is a nice compromise. Amsterdam used to be a car focused city till the late 70s-- and now it is much nicer.
Blind, wheelchair-bound, and elderly people use trains daily everywhere in Tokyo. It only sucks if your city doesn’t value the non-able-bodied (which unfortunately is most of the world).
It also means that, often, it will be slower and/or more inconvenient to use the car.
For example, in my city, for distances inside the urban core, bicycle is usually the fastest mode of transport, public transport is about 1.5x - 2x the bicycle (fine if you are feeling lazy), and car is 1.5x - 3x the bicycle depending on time of day and associated traffic levels.
Sure, if the weather is horrible and I am feeling lazy, I might use my car instead of jumping on the bike, but often after reaching my destination I'll realize that it wasn't really worth taking the car.
> The last thing I want during covid is to be stuck in a metal box with 100 strangers uncomfortably wearing masks instead of in my own car blasting music with the window down.
Or you could walk or take a bicycle (e.g., Amsterdam/Netherlands).
In the event that this is a (somewhat/semi-)serious comment:
First: one doesn't have to cycle all the time. If the weather is bad, or if you just don't feel like it, then one can certainly just not cycle. Feel free to take transit or your car/taxi/uber.
But by designing 'human scale' neighbourhoods this gives people the option of choosing their mode of transportation, instead of being forced to own/operate an expensive piece of equipment that sits idle and depreciates most of the time.
That being said, as someone who cycled in the Before Times to work in Toronto for ~9 months out of year,† I've found the risk of rain was more of a deterrent than actual rain. The number of times I was actually commuting in the rain as quite small over the course of a year.
When I started cycling I would look at the weather forecast, and not take my bicycle if there was a decent chance of rain. And most times it ended up not raining anyway. So at some point I bought rain gear and stuck it in a pannier: I no longer bothered looking at the forecast.
Of course one doesn't need to go for all the funny looking clothing. A simple poncho folded away can be sufficient:
† Often the road conditions were garbage in January and February because a lack of decent practices in snow clearing. Those were the months I generally skipped: I often cycled into December (when it was still 'dry') and often re-started in (mid-)March.
Walking barefoot and living in a cave is also not the end of the world, but most of us would not prefer that kind of life. Not everybody is like you and not everywhere is like Amsterdam.
I have an aunt/uncle in Germany and when I visited them I'd occasionally take one of their bikes out and bike to my grandparents dacha about two miles away. It's cute and super euro but as soon as it's a little cold or rainy I'm over it.
Of course they still own two cars and drive to work despite it being "only" a 15 minute bike ride. They are both MDs.
> Of course they still own two cars and drive to work despite it being "only" a 15 minute bike ride. They are both MDs.
Yeah, I always marvel at Americans who think that Europeans walk, cycle, or take public transit everywhere. Some do, especially students and retirees. However, for working people, car is still king.
Just finished reading Murder on the Orient Express yesterday and made a (naive) mental note to travel the route sometime. This shattered that dream for sure.
The book was somewhat uplifting, portraying the age where the entire world was accessible and you could go anywhere and folks would bow their heads before you everywhere.
Israel isn’t the reason why the trains between Iran and Iraq or between Lebanon and Syria aren’t running.
None of the infrastructure nor even the routes would be viable for a modern railroad infrastructure, blaming Israel for the utter lack of investment in infrastructure across the Middle East is laughable.
I visited the Israel/Lebanon border a few years back and stood at the spot where Israeli guerillas destroyed the British tracks after World War 2. Regardless of whether you champion or despise their politics, it's something that actually happened, and the folks who did it aren't ashamed to post infographics about it on-site.
The Night of the Bridges had nothing to do with the war of independence as it happened in 1946 and was intended to disrupt the logistics of the British army not to prevent an invasion by Arab states.
As an aside, TIL that there are actually two Tripolis, one in Libya and the other in Lebanon.
I have heard references to an ancient, historical Tripoli for years, even in the lyrics of Onward, Christian Soldier. I only knew about the Libyan city and thought the article was mistaken when it referred to "Tripoli, Beirut and Haifa" together as Levantine ports, but "The last train left Tripoli for Beirut at the start of Lebanon’s civil war in 1975" tipped me off that my geography was off, since a train from Libya to Lebanon would not have been possible after Israel closed her borders.