Haifa – Beirut – Tripoli railway line
HBT line Haifa – Beirut – Tripoli | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Cliff of Rosh HaNikra
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Route length: | 226 km | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Gauge : | 1435 mm ( standard gauge ) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Haifa – Beirut – Tripoli (HBT line) connected the cities mentioned from 1942 to 1946 over a total of 229 km and was made in standard gauge .
Framework
The line was an extension of the Haifa – Akko line of the Hejaz Railway from Qirjat Motzkin to the north. Since 1937 there was a three-rail track here , which allowed normal-gauge vehicles to travel . The HBT line closed the gap in the standard-gauge connection between Turkey and Egypt . Until then, all traffic in this connection between Damascus and Haifa had to use the narrow-gauge Hejaz Railway. The reason for the construction was to consolidate the British influence east and north of the Suez Canal during World War II . a. was endangered by French troops in Syria , which had declared in favor of the Vichy regime allied with Germany .
Alignment
Different routes were considered. The northernmost point reached by a standard gauge line from Egypt was Haifa. The southernmost points that could be reached by the standard-gauge Baghdad Railway from Turkey were Tripoli on the Mediterranean coast and Rayak in the mountains of Lebanon. The mountainous topography , which would have required a lot of civil engineering and that a considerable amount of work would have had to be done in hard basalt rock , spoke against the connection to Rayak, which is shorter as the crow flies . Since the British had sea sovereignty anyway, the decision was made in favor of a route along the coast. In some places, however, the railway had to be built so close to the sea that waves crashed against trains when the sea was stormy and the route was washed away several times during the few years of operation. The route is also likely to be the only one that has ever been torpedoed by a submarine (the damage is said to have been minimal).
construction
The line was built from September 1941 by railroad military contingents from the British Commonwealth and civil engineers. The Haifa-Beirut section was built by South African civil engineers, the Beirut-Tripoli section by the Australian military. The tunnels were built by miners from South African gold mines.
The narrow-gauge track from Haifa to Akko was expanded as a three - rail track up to the Naʿaman connection (19 km) and from there the normal-gauge line continued north. In the southern section, Haifa-Beirut, seven larger, eight smaller bridges and 98 culverts were built. In the north, Beirut-Tripoli, nine larger and numerous smaller bridges had to be built. A number of tunnels also had to be built. The construction time was about a year, six months less than originally estimated.
business
The route has been released for operation in sections:
- Tripoli-Cheka on July 22, 1942
- Haifa-Beirut in August 1942
- The entire route on December 22, 1942. An official ceremony took place.
The route was operated by the military and with military vehicles and was used almost exclusively for military traffic. In practice, HBT locomotives and personnel drove passenger trains to Haifa, including the short three-rail section north of Haifa, which belonged to Palestine Railways (PR). For the other trains, the personnel and locomotive change took place in Tel Achsiv (Azzib / az-Zib), today: Betzet , north of Naharija , where the HBT operated a large depot and a marshalling yard. The trains were driven south of Tel Achsiv with PR locomotives and personnel. The other major depots were in Bahsas , south of Tripoli, and furnished in Beirut.
On July 1, 1945, the HBT line between Haifa and Naharija was finally opened to civil traffic with an opening train. However, there was never any civil traffic on the entire route. The British military authorities refused to open up through traffic from Istanbul to Cairo. From 1946 onwards , the Taurus Express ran twice a week with through coaches to Tripoli, and the passengers were then carried on by road to Haifa. In 1948 the through cars to Tripoli are no longer listed. In 1949, the international timetable conference - contrary to all the political upheavals that had taken place in the Middle East (see Palestine War ) - considered the interruption of the route to be provisional.
vehicles
Since around 1943, diesel locomotives also drove the HBT line for the first time . Built by Whitcomb , they developed 650 hp.
For the HBT line, broad gauge passenger cars were imported from the Great Indian Peninsula Railway and reworked on site for standard gauge.
The End
The HBT line was sold north of the later Israeli state border at the end of 1946 from Great Britain for £ 5 million to Lebanon and continued to be operated by the Damas – Hama et Prolongements (DHP) railway. In June of the same year, the British military ceased operations on the HBT line north of Tel Achziv / Betzet. The border crossing to Lebanon should never be used again.
The line, located in Palestine, was integrated into the network of Rakkevet Israel (RI) two years later and today forms the northern branch of the coastal railway of its main north-south connection Nahariya-Beersheba .
The most prominent structural relic of the stretch to the north of Betzet are the tunnels in the cliff of Rosh HaNiqra (Arabic: Raʾs an-Naqura ) protruding into the Mediterranean . The border between Israel and Lebanon runs through one of these .
literature
- Paul Cotterell: The Railways of Palestine and Israel . Tourret Books, Abington 1986, ISBN 0-905-87804-3
- Neil Robinson: World Rail Atlas . Vol. 8: The Middle East and Caucasus . 2006.
- Walter Rothschild : Arthur Kirby and the last years of Palestine Railways: 1945–1948 , Berlin: Selbstverlag, 2009, plus London King's College Diss., 2009.