Afula – Nablus railway line
| Afula – Nablus | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Route length: | 36 km | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gauge : | 1050 mm | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| States : | Israel , Palest. Auton.-born | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Afula – Nablus line was a branch line of the Jezreel Valley Railway in the 1050 mm gauge of the Hejaz Railway , whose original intention was to establish a connection from its network to Jerusalem , but which was never continued beyond Nablus .
history
construction
Projected since 1908, but not started until 1912, a line branching off the Haifa –Dar'a railway line in Afula was supposed to lead to Jerusalem. At that time, the city had a rail connection exclusively through the J&J line Jaffa-Jerusalem . Their concessionaire was the French Société du Chemin de Fer Ottoman de Jaffa à Jérusalem et Prolongements (J & J), so that the French government intervened in Istanbul because of the threat of competition with the Sublime Porte , government of the Ottoman Empire . The governments then agreed that the Hejaz Railway should not go south beyond Nablus . The proposal made by Meissner-Pascha in 1908 to connect the railway from Afula to Lod on the J&J line Jaffa- Jerusalem was not carried out at this time.
In 1913 17 km of the route to Jenin were completed; When the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in 1914, Nablus was almost reached and the railway to Sileh (today Silat eẓ-Ẓahr ) was in operation. In total, the route was 36 km long.
First World War
When the Ottoman Empire entered the war, consideration for French interests was over. However, it was now urgent to press ahead with the construction of the railway in the direction of the Suez Canal , the primary target of the Ottoman army. Sileh, as the southernmost point that could be reached from the north by rail, was an important transshipment point for the troops of the Central Powers and their supply on the way south to the Sinai and Palestine fronts .
The Ottoman Military Railroad in Palestine took the Afula – Nablus railway line, also known as the Samaria Railway , as the starting point for their railway construction, but drove the new line from the Samaritan mountains westwards down to the Sharon Plain, where the railway was technically easier to build. Leaving the lonely al-Maṣʿūdiyya station below the Patriarch 's Way (today Landstrasse 60) on the Samaria Railway, heading eastwards, the route took a 180 ° curve in the westward sloping incision of a tributary of the Nablus and followed its valley (Wadi az-Zaymar, also Wadi al-She'ir) via Anabta to Tulkarm . Due to the sharp bend, the military railroad spared itself a time-consuming change of direction in north-south traffic. From Tulkarm, the route continues southwards over a section of the J&J line from Lod to the Sinai . As part of the Damascus - Sinai supply line, the Afula – Nablus line was of paramount importance for three years.
Term of office
Coming from the Sultanate of Egypt , the British military, during the conquest of Palestine , used the British military railways in Palestine to advance standard gauge (1435 mm) rail lines north. One of the lines joined the J&J line at Lod station . All occupied lines in 1050 mm gauge, which German and Ottoman soldiers had built south of Tulkarm during the war, the British changed to 1435 mm, so also the military line Maṣʿūdiyya – Sinai in the section between Lod and Tulkarm (today called Ostbahn ), and extended it north to Haifa .
The Afula – Nablus railway line and the remaining line to Tulkarm branching off from it in al-Maṣʿūdiyya remained torsos that never grew beyond a local feeder function. The journey from Tulkarm to Nablus was tedious because of the incline, many tight bends and because the trains had to change direction at Maṣudiyya station. The routes were so insignificant in their traffic volume that the Palestine Railways , to which these routes were now subordinate, the traffic temporarily stopped. In 1944 freight traffic between Afula and Nablus was resumed, but stopped again in 1946 due to a lack of demand.
present
After Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, invading armies from neighboring Arab states opened the international war for Israel's independence . The invaders and Israel's army fought here in battles against each specific territorial lines and fixed them as so-called Green Line in the 1949 armistice agreements of the countries Egypt , Lebanon , Jordan and Syria with Israel . The war opponents did not make peace, they did not agree on recognized borders, nor did they enter into these cross-border traffic or diplomatic relations.
The Green Line, which then became the de facto closed border between Israel and Jordan until 1967, also cut the Samaria Railway and the northern end of the Maṣʿūdiyya – Sinai line. The sections of the line located on Jordanian territory, which had already been closed since 1946, could only have started up again as an island operation without traffic via the Green Line or a connection to the Hejaz Railway in the east that had yet to be established. Rail traffic was then not resumed on the Jordanian side. The plants were largely dismantled in the following period. The tunnel remained in the stretch between Silat eẓ-Ẓahr and Maṣʿūdiyya, today a local tourist attraction.
literature
- Paul Cotterell: The Railways of Palestine and Israel . Tourret Books, Abington 1986. ISBN 0-905878-04-3
- Uwe Pfullmann: The Baghdad and Hedjaz Railway in the First World War 1914–1918 . In: Jürgen Franzke (Ed.): Bagdadbahn and Hedjazbahn. German railway history in the Middle East . Nürnberg 2003. ( ISBN 3-921590-05-1 ), pp. 125-138.
- Walter Rothschild : Arthur Kirby and the last years of Palestine Railways: 1945–1948 , Berlin: Selbstverlag, 2009, plus King's College London Diss., 2009. OCLC 495751217
Individual evidence
- ^ Naval Intelligence Division , Palestine and Transjordan , London, New York and Bahrain: Paul Kegan, 2006, p. 370. ISBN 978-0-7103-1028-6 .
- ↑ Walter Rothschild, Arthur Kirby and the last years of Palestine Railways: 1945–1948 , Berlin: Selbstverlag, 2009, plus King's College Diss., 2009, footnote 711 on p. 170.
- ↑ Ibrahim Abdelhadi: Tulkarm Aims to Renovate Century-Old Ottoman Train Tunnel . In: Al-Monitor. Palestine Pulse from August 15, 2017. Reproduced in: HaRakevet , No. 119 (2017), p. 14f.