The Hejaz Railway at Wadi Rum

 

When you spend your desert adventure in Jordan, you will do so most probably at Wadi Rum, retracing the steps of films like “The Martian” or “Lawrence of Arabia”. Your bus or jeep will also stop at an old train on the Hejaz Railway [1].

The Hejaz Railway ran from Damaskus to Medina [2]. The name Hejaz Railway had been coined, because a very long stretch of the 1300 km was operating in the Hejaz region in Saudi Arabia. The Hejaz region is composed of Mecca, Medina, Ta'if and Al Abwa, with more 460,000 sqk, which would place this region between the states of Cameroon and Papua New Guinea. Construction started in 1900 and parts were opened in 1907, the railway was operational in between 1908-1920 with interruptions during the World War I. The original idea was to shorten the time for pilgrims to Mecca, but later it turned out that such a railway could be use for military transport. That is where Lawrence of Arabia comes into play, as he and Prince Faisal recruited in Wadi Rum and „fought a guerilla-style war by interrupting train passages on the Hejaz Railway“ [3].

Jordan is still using parts or had been using until recently: from Amman to Damascus as the Hedjaz Jordan Railway, but this service has been suspeneded [4] and from the phosphate mines near Ma'an to the Gulf of Aqaba. The phosphate railway is also history; the Hejaz Railway had been abandoned long ago and from 1975 until 2018 there had been the Aqaba Rail, which had to be abandoned because the new habour of Aqaba is without railway connection [7] There had been rumours about establishing a Haifa – Riyadh railway using parts of the Hejaz Railway [6], but maybe COVID-19 has frozen the enthusiasm since 1918.

Maybe there is another problem – the track gauge. The Hejaz Railway uses a narrow gauge ot 1,050 mm, whereas most other railways use the 1,435 mm gauge [7].

Near Shakaria you can visit the refurbished locomotive and a couple of waggons, which are locked by the way, but you can climb up and take a picture  from the outside. I like the remnants of bygone eras and visited a few of them [8].

Links and Annotations:
[1] You can look at the spot on Google Maps: 29.69965678126896 N, 35.39611450921805 E. A settlement close by (southeast) is called Shakaria, but Google always wants to correct it to Shakira. If that nips you, nips don't lie.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hejaz_railway  
[3] https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/hejaz-railway-train-wadi-rum
[4] https://www.seat61.com/Jordan.htm
[5] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqababahn
[6] https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20180619-israel-saudi-preparing-for-railway-link/
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_track_gauges 55% of world wide tracks use the 1,435 mm gauge.
[8] Here is a picture of the Uyuni railway graveyard: https://rheumatologe.blogspot.com/2021/06/lyrik-taschenkalender-2018_14.html I've also seen the train, which had been robbed by Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid – I haven't published this picture, yet. Or the train, in which Kim Song Il went to Pyongyang: https://rheumatologe.blogspot.com/search/label/NorthKorea     

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