The Hejaz Railway: Damascus to Medina by steam

A railway built for pilgrims

At the close of the nineteenth century the pilgrimage from Damascus to Medina meant roughly forty days by camel caravan through some of the harshest country in Arabia — expensive, exhausting and prey to raids. In 1900 the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II launched a railway to change that: a line from Damascus down the old pilgrim road to Medina, with an eventual extension to Mecca. It doubled, unmistakably, as an instrument of empire — moving troops and binding the distant Hejaz to Istanbul — but it was presented and funded as a pious work. Donations were collected from Muslims across the world, from Ottoman officials' salaries to subscriptions raised in India, and the project was framed so that the holy land of the Hejaz would be served by a railway built with Muslim money.

Construction was directed by the German engineer Heinrich August Meissner ("Meissner Pasha") with Ottoman army labour doing much of the digging. The line was built to a narrow 1,050 mm gauge, and driving it south meant crossing basalt fields, sand and waterless steppe, with stations spaced around water points. On 1 September 1908 — the anniversary of the sultan's accession — the first train steamed into Medina, about 1,300 km from Damascus. The journey that had taken a caravan some forty days now took a matter of days. Passenger numbers grew quickly, and Medina found itself connected, via Damascus, to the wider Ottoman rail network.

War and destruction

The railway's working life was startlingly short. When the First World War came, the line became the lifeline of the Ottoman garrison in the Hejaz — and therefore the prime target of the Arab Revolt that began in 1916. Forces raised by Sharif Hussein of Mecca, advised by British officers including T. E. Lawrence, mined the track and ambushed trains along the desert sections again and again; wrecked locomotives from those raids still lie beside the embankment in the Saudi and Jordanian desert. Medina itself, supplied by the line, endured a long siege: its Ottoman commander Fakhri Pasha refused to yield until January 1919, after the war itself had ended.

South of what is now Jordan the damage was never repaired. Postwar schemes to revive the through route came and went for decades, but no train has run from Damascus to Medina since. The dream of extending the rails to Mecca died with the line — the two holy cities were finally connected by rail only in 2018, by the modern Haramain high-speed railway, which covers Medina–Mecca in about two and a half hours at up to 300 km/h.

The line in numbers

The station today

Medina's terminus survived. The handsome stone station in the Al-Anbariya district, a short ride west of the Prophet's Mosque, was restored and now houses a museum — preserved platforms, workshops and steam locomotives, together with exhibits on the history of the city. It is the most atmospheric relic of the line anywhere in Saudi Arabia and an easy add-on to a city visit; details and other collections are on the museums page, and the site is marked on the interactive map. For how pilgrims actually reach Medina today — by air and high-speed rail — see the transport guide.

Common questions