Peshawar – Landi Khana railway line
| Peshawar – Landi Khana | |
|---|---|
 The Chaiber Pass railway line, 1993
as a tourist attraction with a steam locomotive | |
| Gauge : | 1676 mm ( colonial track ) |
The Peschawar – Landi Khana ( English : Khyber-Pass-Railway ) is a single-track , non- electrified railway line in the Hindukush over the Chaiber Pass in Pakistan .
Routing
The route still leads from the West Pakistani city of Peshawar to Landi Kotal . The further section to the Pakistani- Afghan border town of Landi Khana was shut down again shortly after it was put into operation , but is still there.
The route begins at the Peshawar train station. On the outskirts, it crosses the airport runway, which nowadays almost always results in long waiting times for departure. Up to Jamrud at an altitude of 461 meters, it runs relatively flat through a foothill plain. From there it's 16 kilometers in length and through several tunnels and two switchbacks to Shahgai , which is just below the apex of the route at 818 meters. The route is then also quite mountainous for a distance of 18 kilometers to Landi Kotal , which is at an altitude of 760 meters.
The Landi Kotal station has a very extensive track system with six tracks, completely oversized for the originally scheduled operation of three trains per week, but of strategic military importance.
The three-kilometer continuation to Landi Khana was shut down again shortly after commissioning. It has tunnels and another hairpin on the short length of the route.
Since the line was built primarily for military reasons, the cost of construction hardly played a role. For this reason, the route is relatively complex. There are four switchbacks, 92 bridges, 34 tunnels and very extensive track systems on the 40-kilometer stretch to Landi Kotal that has been preserved today.
history
The first plans to build a railway line from Peshawar to Kabul were made during the second war in Afghanistan in 1879. Due to the difficult geography, however, the construction was classified as too complicated and expensive, which is why the line was only built up to the first foothills at Fort Jamrud until 1901 .
In 1919, the feasibility of the entire line was declared in an expert report and construction could begin as early as 1920 after the local Pathan tribes had given their consent. On November 3, 1925, Landi Kotal, where a fortress of the British Army was located, was finally reached. The remainder of the route to the border town of Landi Khana was completed by 1926. During the construction, the continuation of the construction towards Kabul was already planned and some preparatory work for an extension to Tork-ham was already done, but this was never built. The section between Landi Kotal and Landi Khana was abandoned as early as 1932, but never dismantled. All the tracks and signals are still there, even though the route has been partially buried by rockslides.
With the independence of Pakistan in 1947, the route was taken over by the newly established Pakistan State Railways .
Since the 1970s, there has only been one weekly train, always on Friday, which mostly consisted of only two passenger cars and occasionally freight cars. With the beginning of the Soviet-Afghan war in 1980, passenger traffic was completely discontinued and freight traffic largely came to a standstill.
During the 1990s, the Pakistani government tried to market the route as a tourist attraction. As far as the security situation allowed, special trains with steam locomotives occasionally ran .
The Chaiber Pass area was never actually under British or Pakistani control, but was always ruled by the local Pashtun tribes. For this reason, the Khyber Rifles were founded, an armed militia made up of tribesmen who are paid by the Pakistani central government to protect the route.