There is a viaduct north of Beirut, at the mouth of the Nahr al-Kalb river, where the rock face has been used for four thousand years as a billboard for conquerors. Rameses II carved his victory there. So did Nebuchadnezzar, the Assyrians, the Greeks, and Napoleon. In December 1942, British and Australian engineers added their own inscription, marking the completion of a coastal railway line that ran uninterrupted from Tel Aviv to Tripoli, the last link in a rail network connecting Africa to the gates of Europe.
Today that line is a ghost. The tracks rust into the Lebanese coastline. The stations have been occupied by militias, used as barricades, or slowly swallowed by weeds. No train has crossed the border between Lebanon and Israel in over seventy years. Yet for one brief window of history, you could board a train in what is now Tel Aviv and ride the sea-cliff coast northward into Beirut and keep going, all the way to Istanbul or Cairo.
This is that story.
The Hejaz Railway locomotive
In September 1900, Sultan Abdülhamid II ordered construction to begin on the Hejaz Railway, a project initially intended to link Mecca to Damascus and eventually to Istanbul. The goal was to create an efficient route for Muslim pilgrims, reducing the grueling forty-day camel journey from Damascus to Mecca to just a few days.
But the railway was never only about pilgrimage. It was about sovereignty. The Ottoman Empire in 1900 was hemorrhaging territory, the Balkans gone, Egypt effectively under British control, European powers circling like creditors at a bankruptcy. A great railway, funded entirely by Muslim donations from Singapore to South Africa, would demonstrate that the Ottomans could still build, still command, still hold their empire together by steel and will.
The railway was designated as waqf, an Islamic endowment, meaning the Ottomans did not own the lines; they simply managed them on behalf of God. That framing mattered. It made the project an act of civilization, not just a mere transport infrastructure.
By 1905, the main Damascus-to-Medina trunk line had a branch running southwest from Daraa to Haifa on the Mediterranean. The choice of Haifa was pointed: it allowed the Ottoman government to rid itself of the French monopoly over the Beirut-Damascus line, which controlled commercial shipping and transport. The French had their railway snaking inland through the mountains to Damascus. The Ottomans answered with a line to Haifa, driving freight prices down and pulling cargo away from Beirut’s port.
The “Valley Train” (Rakevet HaEmek) quickly became the economic artery of the northern Levant, running through the Jezreel Valley past villages, citrus groves, and the early Jewish settlements of Ottoman Palestine.
The Jezreel Valley Railway
Two competing empires, two competing railways and between them, the landscape of the Levant as a chessboard.
The French had been in the region first, building the Beirut-Damascus line in 1895. Their concession gave them de facto monopoly over the trade routes of inland Syria. The British looked at Haifa the way the Ottomans had: a knife pointed at French commercial dominance of the coast.
After WWI dismembered the Ottoman Empire, the British took the Mandate over Palestine and inherited its railways. Palestine Railways expanded the network considerably connecting Haifa southward to Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and all the way to Cairo via the Sinai. But the coastal link northward to Lebanon remained stubbornly absent. The French held their mandate over Lebanon and Syria. The mountains between the coast and the Bekaa Valley were brutal. And there was no urgent reason to build the missing link.
That reason arrived in 1940, in the form of the Second World War.
When France fell to Germany, its Vichy government administered Lebanon and Syria and promptly opened the region’s airfields to the Luftwaffe. Churchill sent in Australian and Free French forces in 1941 to wrest the Levant back. They succeeded. Now the British held a continuous strip of territory from Cape Town to the gates of Anatolia.
The strategic imperative was clear: a railway linking Egypt, Palestine, and Lebanon would allow mass movement of troops and materiel across the entire theater. The British originally planned to connect their standard-gauge network from Haifa to Riyaq in the Bekaa Valley, but gave up the project in 1941 as too difficult as the mountain terrain required bridges over gorges that could never be completed in time.
Instead, they looked at the coast. South African Army engineers built the first section of the new Haifa–Beirut–Tripoli railway, running along the rocky shoreline and through two tunnels. The South Africans were transferred to other duties and the Haifa–Beirut section was completed by the New Zealand Railway Group. The Beirut-to-Tripoli stretch was the work of an Australian unit under Lieutenant Colonel Keith Fraser, an engineer who would later become Commissioner of New South Wales Railways.
The Haifa–Beirut railway was open for traffic by August 1942. By December that year, the railway had reached Tripoli and was fully operational. The inscription the Australians left at Nahr al-Kalb placed them in 3,000 years of conquerors. General Alexander drove the last spike there himself.
The Nahr al-Kalb viaduct and coastal railway bridge
At that moment, it became possible to travel by train from Haifa to Cairo, to Beirut and from there, onward to Turkey and Iraq to Damascus and Amman. The entire Middle East was briefly one continuous rail network. A single ticket could, in theory, take you from the Nile Delta to the Bosphorus.
The line never carried civilians. It was purely military, for the duration of the war. But it existed. The rails were there. The timetables could have been written.
The end came fast and with deliberate violence.
In June 1946, Palmach forces destroyed 11 road and rail links with neighbouring countries in a single night, including the standard-gauge links connecting Palestine with Egypt and Lebanon. The Night of the Bridges was a demonstration of power by the Jewish underground organisation, signaling that the British Mandate’s infrastructure could be held hostage. The railway to Beirut was cut.
The British maintained the line under military control as late as February 1948, when the Jewish forces, in preparation for statehood, destroyed the bridges near the tunnels at Ras al-Naqura. With Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948 and the immediate Arab-Israeli war, whatever remained of cross-border rail was finished. The shut down of this infrastructure was existential to the newly born country.
In Lebanon, the railway limped on for decades. In 1975, the Beirut-Damascus line stopped running. In 1979, the coastal railway suffered a bomb attack. Militia groups occupied railway stations, using them for torture, vandalising property and using locomotives as barricades across conflict zones. The last trains on the Lebanese coast ran in 1994.
Abandoned Lebanese railway station, present day
At Rosh HaNikra, the white chalk cliffs at Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, you can still walk into the tunnels the British and Australians blasted through the headland for the 1942 railway. They are now a tourist cable-car attraction. The old track bed is a footpath.
On the Lebanese side, the coastal rail line from Naqoura to Tripoli still exists on maps. The tracks are there, in many places. Israel Railways has proposed a rail link from Lebanon to its own network, branching off the Haifa-Karmiel line though these plans are unlikely to materialize given the absence of diplomatic relations between the two countries.
Turkey has launched diplomatic overtures to regional states to revive the Hejaz Railway, and in 2018, following the signing of a protocol in Beirut, it took on the task of renovating a train station in Lebanon’s Tripoli.
The Jezreel Valley railway today: restored section near Haifa/Beit She’an
There is something almost unbearable about the simplicity of the obstacle. The rails exist. The tunnels exist. The viaduct at Nahr al-Kalb still stands, with its four-millennia column of commemorative inscriptions, pharaohs, emperors, Australian sappers. The distance from Haifa to Beirut is 90 kilometers. By train, at modest speed, it would take an hour and a half.
For three years in the middle of the twentieth century, you could make that journey. Then the bridges were blown, the borders sealed, and the clocks stopped.
As the Middle East is being reshaped by the ongoing war and conflicts between Israël and Iran and within Lebanon and Syria, the dreams of reconnection persist. One can believe that this time, the railroad will extend through a different path all the way down to Riyadh and… who knows… to Teheran.