Palestine Railways

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The Palestine Railways were founded on October 1, 1920 in the British Mandate of Palestine and existed until the State of Israel was founded on May 14, 1948. In 1996 the Railway Company of the Palestinian Autonomous Areas was founded, but has not yet started rail operations due to a lack of rolling stock and notably navigable routes.

Route map in an atlas from 1933
Advert from 1922

prehistory

When the Ottoman Empire dissolved after the First World War and the borders in the Middle East were redrawn, the Mandate Palestine was also created under British sovereignty.

Palestine Railways

High Commissioner Herbert Samuel at the reopening of the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway in 1920, the mm from 1050 to 1435 umgespurt was.

On October 1, 1920, Palestine Railways (PR) was founded as the “state” authority of the mandate area. It received the operating rights of all railways in the area of ​​Palestine. These diverged considerably in terms of their technical parameters, the equipment with operating resources and the property . There were routes in four different gauges (600 mm, 762 mm, 1050 mm, 1435 mm). The ownership issues - especially with regard to the railway infrastructure - could never be settled satisfactorily overall:

  • The owners of the Jaffa – Jerusalem (J & J) line, which was confiscated by the Ottoman side during the war, were compensated in 1922. This route clearly belonged to the mandate area.
  • The PR took over the British Military Railways in Palestine (Palestine Military Railways - PMR)
    • as far as they were in Palestine. She bought the mandate from Great Britain .
    • Furthermore, the operation was for those in Egypt lying Sinai train to El Qantara in PR. The temporary bridge that spanned the Suez Canal during the war had to be removed at the request of the canal administration, so that the Sinai Railway was separated from the rest of the Egyptian State Railways (ESR) network . This led to the decision to transfer the operation of the entire route from El Qantara on the Suez Canal to Haifa, i.e. also in Egypt, to PR. Ownership of the route remained with Great Britain and was transferred to Egypt in 1948.
  • The ownership of the sections of the Hejaz Railway in Palestine was particularly contentious:
Haifa-Ost station, 1931, with a passenger train and 1918 Baldwin H-Class 2'C

administration

The main PR administration was set up in Haifa , the intersection of standard and narrow gauge , where the administration of the Hejaz Railway was already located in the prewar period and where the milestone “0” is traditionally located. Here she stayed for the successor organization, Israel Railways (IR). In addition, Haifa was the emerging port on the coast of Palestine after the First World War.

traffic

The mandate power invested little in Palestine. Their main concern was to keep the area as an additional glacis to protect the Suez Canal . In general, only the bare essentials were invested in mandate areas, since - in contrast to colonies - they were regarded as only temporarily belonging to the British Empire. For PR, this meant that they often had to make do with outdated rolling stock and had hardly any investment funds.

The poor economic situation of the railway was the reason to have it checked by Sir Felix Pole for the British High Commissioner of Palestine in 1934/35 . The inspection was caused not least by a drastic increase in the number of locomotive failures, which doubled from 72 (1933) to 153 (1934) - while halving the kilometers traveled until the next visit to the workshop. In 1934 there were 41 mainline locomotives in the workshop at a time. This not only had a catastrophic impact on scheduled operations. Even for construction trains there were no longer any locomotives available, so the line maintenance suffered. The main problem for the locomotives was considered to be the poor quality of the available water, which ruined the boilers.

Passenger traffic only slowly picked up again after the war. In 1923, therefore, fare reductions were implemented, which caused a drastic increase in the number of travelers. But passenger numbers were already falling again at the end of the 1920s - especially in 1st class. The clientele transported here was the first to discover the car - and could afford it. Once again in 1929, the fares in 3rd class were reduced, with the result that 95% of all travelers were now traveling in 3rd class. But now the public bus service began, which was also aimed at this group. Further economic problems arose from the stock market crash in 1929, especially tourist traffic collapsed.

stretch

The narrow-gauge lines with gauges of 600 mm and 762 mm, field railways from the First World War, were very soon replaced or shut down, with the exception of small remnants with feeder functions.

Sinai range

El Kantara - Tel Aviv ticket

The sand drifts in Sinai were problematic. The sand migrated both over the rails and under the rails. The sleepers were of poor quality, their wood untreated, and large numbers of termites fell victim to them. The thresholds that survived this suffered from “natural shrinkage” - wood was rare on the Sinai and in Palestine. Other railway material was also stolen in large quantities. Overall, the Sinai route turned out to be a great burden for PR.

Suggestions for improvement

The review of PR 1934/35 produced a number of suggestions for improvement of the line network, especially in the area around Tel Aviv, including a shortened north (to Haifa) and south (to El Qantara and Jerusalem) connection from Jaffa / Tel Aviv, including theirs inner-city connection, a project that was only realized in the 1980s through the Ajalon corridor. Of the proposals, however, the standard-gauge expansion of the Jaffa train station - Jaffa port connection was only implemented in 1937 - a route on which trains only rarely due to the general decline in traffic in the port of Jaffa, which was gradually being replaced by the port of Haifa wrong. In this context, Haifa also received a new central station: Haifa Central (Merkaz).

Network expansions

From 1920, the network was expanded to include short routes, mostly for freight traffic:

In addition, the main line was straightened in places.

Timetable of the railroad in Palestine from May 1, 1944

Supplementary route Rosh HaAyin – Petach Tikva

The Rosh HaAyin – Petach Tikwa line is now part of the Jarkon Railway and served expanding orange plantations . Oranges had to be brought to the ships quickly and fresh in order to be able to export them. That could not be done with camel caravans on undeveloped sandy slopes. So immediately after the First World War, the orange growers campaigned against the PMR for a rail link to the main El Qantara – Haifa line. They couldn't pay for such an expensive investment in one fell swoop, but Baron Edmond de Rothschild agreed to provide £  E20,000 in credit for the project. However, the PMR insisted that the settlers guarantee at least 100 passengers a day. In contrast, these made it a condition that no intercourse should take place on the Sabbath , whereupon the PMR insisted on stopping traffic on Sundays as well. In 1921 the branch line went into operation after six months of construction - the construction costs, however, contrary to the expected £ E 20,000, amounted to £ E 53,000. But the railway was an immediate economic success. The cost of transporting oranges to the coast fell by more than half. Tourist traffic was also granted immediate success, as the train replaced a four to five-hour journey in an open horse-drawn wagon over an unpaved sand runway. Travelers accepted the somewhat cumbersome procedure on the railroad: One or two passenger cars were added to the freight train to Ras el Ain (today: Rosh HaAyin ) and attached to the Haifa – El Qantara train as far as Lydda . In Lydda everyone had to change to the train from Jerusalem to Jaffa. Total travel time - if everything went on time - about 90 minutes. However, when the road to Jaffa was paved in 1928, it immediately put an end to travel on this interesting connection. Busses now took over the task. On September 20, 1949, the western extension of the line to Tel Aviv, running in the Jarkon Valley, opened as the Jarkon Railway, where the Tel Aviv Zafon station technically opened in the area of ​​the city of Bnei Braq . For decades, the Jarkon Railway was part of the main line of the Rakkevet Israel railway company and serves as a freight bypass for the metropolitan area and, since 2003, also for passenger traffic to Kfar Saba .

Haifa – Baghdad

The project to build a rail link between Haifa and Baghdad , which was seriously examined in the 1930s, was never realized. Although the route was completely surveyed in 1930/31, due to the competition with the Suez Canal, the project did not pay off.

business

The travel speed - even of the fastest PR trains - was less than 50 km / h. The theoretical maximum speed was 50 mph (80 km / h).

PR had taken over PMR's main workshop in El Qantara. It was very impractical for the maintenance of the vehicles because it was far from the center of operations and was replaced in 1932 by the repair shop (Aw) on the Kishon , north of Haifa, at the point of contact between the standard gauge and the Hejaz Railway, and with a three-rail track with Haifa-Ost connected.

Sinai stretches

On the Sinai line, trains initially received travel commands through flag signals, later entry and exit signals were installed. There was a mechanical block fuse on the double-track section between El Qantara and Rafah and an electrical block fuse on the single-track section .

The passenger train between El Qantara and Haifa ran daily (412 km in 12 hours). Three times a week he drove dining and sleeping cars for the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits . The PR didn't offer either on the remaining days. In 1921 the connection was supplemented by an El Qantara – Jerusalem sleeping car . This apparently did not pay off and in 1923 was only used when required (defined as at least eight booked passengers). The El Qantara – Cairo sleeping car was offered daily from 1923 onwards.

The period between 1920 and 1939 was the only time you could travel from Europe to Egypt by train. The route led through Istanbul , Ankara , Aleppo , Damascus , Darʿā , Haifa and El Qantara. All overnight stays could be covered in carriages of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits - apart from the Bosporus and Suez Canal crossing. However, this was not possible with through carriages. Passengers arriving from Damascus on the daytime train on the narrow-gauge Hejaz Railway were allowed to spend the night in the sleeping car provided before continuing on to El Qantara and Cairo.

Freight traffic took place on the route as required. One track was completely sufficient for this small volume. The second track, from the time of military operation in World War I between El Qantara and Rafah , was dismantled again in 1923/24.

Bridge over the Ofaqim wadi, 2015

The line between Rafah and Beersheba saw some civil traffic sporadically after the First World War (one train per week). Their operations were stopped in 1927. Structural remnants of the route can still be seen in the terrain west of Be'er Scheva, south of Ofaqim there is still a large bridge.

Tel Aviv – Haifa

From Tel Aviv - one of the most important cities in the country just a few years after it was founded - travelers first had to drive south to Lydda before they could continue in the northerly direction they intended. This deficiency has also been bridged by a bus connection since 1933. A special feature was the bus connection between Haifa and Beirut , which was used in addition to rail traffic and bridged the gap in rail traffic.

Hejaz Railway

The PR also took over the eastern part of the Hejaz Railway network , which now belongs to Palestine , the Haifa – Dar'a (to al-Hama station, 192 km), Haifa – Akko and Afula – Nablus lines from the PMR's inherited holdings . It also took over the section of the Hejaz Railway, which was now in Transjordan - later Jordan - (436 km), between Nassib , the border station to what is now French Syria , and Maʿan . A separate railway administration, the CFH (Chemin de Fer Hijaz), was established in Syria. Three conferences in Beirut distributed the legacies of the Hejaz Railway, especially the vehicles: 50% each went to the Syrian and the Palestinian / Transjordan successor administration. Cross-border trains now changed their clothing in Samakh .

The second half of the mandate

Concrete bunker on flat car 1936. Israeli Railway Museum

Increased Jewish immigration led the Arabs living in Palestine to existential fear and ultimately to unrest. For PR this meant a steadily increasing number of assassinations from 1936 onwards. As countermeasures, strategically important points, such as bridges, were provided with concrete shelters, patrolled along the routes, first on foot, then with armored trains, later with specially made draisines , converted road vehicles. The success was moderate. Again and again there were successful attacks on trains and rail systems. After the assassination attempt on a passenger train on October 14, 1937, operations were temporarily interrupted after dark. The number of passengers dropped dramatically, and military traffic grew considerably. On September 5, 1938, the Jerusalem – Lydda line was interrupted for months by an attack. Jaffa was an Arab city - the port soon became unusable due to a boycott. All of its traffic shifted to Haifa.

In 1938 there were almost 700 attacks, 13 railway workers were killed and 123 injured. 44 trains derailed, 33 patrol vehicles blew up or were at least badly damaged, 27 station buildings were completely or partially destroyed, 21 bridges damaged. The damage to signaling and telegraph systems and water supply installations was numerous . The trains finally ran in convoy and within sight - with an armored trolley ahead.

Second World War

Politico-military situation

With the outbreak of the Second World War , the unrest stopped almost suddenly. The Jewish part of the population supported the United Kingdom's war efforts against Hitler, the Arab population persisted in a negative neutrality. Railway operations ran without the disruptions of the pre-war years.

After the occupation of France, Germany recognized the Hitler-friendly government of Marshal Pétain and left it with the colonial forces on the condition that German troops were allowed to use the railways in Tunisia and Syria to deploy against the Suez Canal. A Hitler-friendly coup in Iraq , Rommel's advance into Egypt and the Russian campaign brought German access to the oil fields of the Middle East into the realm of possibility. Before the campaign in Africa in 1942, the acts of war had little influence on the rail operations in Palestine. But since the preparation of the British attack against Rommel's army, the traffic of the PR increased dramatically. It tripled between 1940 and 1945.

Rosh HaNikra tunnel on the Haifa – Beirut – Tripoli railway on the Lebanese border, built in 1941/42 for military traffic

Expansion of the operating facilities

In 1942 a swing bridge was built over the Suez Canal at Firdan , which replaced the ferry service at El Qantara. Through trains immediately ran between Cairo and Haifa. The route south of Gaza was placed under military administration. To increase the capacity, 22 additional passing points were built.

Also in 1942, the Haifa – Beirut – Tripoli (HBT) line was opened as an extension of the standard gauge that ran on a three- rail track between Haifa and Kirjat Motzkin.

Stanier 8F 1'C locomotive 70513, built in 1941, imported for service in World War II, with Israel Railways at Zichron Ya'akov, January 4, 1949

business

The operation could only be maintained because of the locomotives made available by the British War Office . The level of vandalism, especially on the cars, was alarming, as every light bulb and every door handle fetched its price on the black market. In addition, freight trains were looted. In this context, the Railway Police was created in 1943 . In contrast, losses from enemy actions were negligible. They were limited to some damage caused by bombing the port facilities in Haifa.

The high point of the traffic volume was the autumn of 1943, when after the capitulation of Italy Haifa could be approached by ships without any problems. The marshalling yards in Haifa and Lydda were expanded. In order to cope with the volume of traffic, a large number of passenger and freight cars were used on the neighboring railways, especially the ESR. There were also freight wagons from British and US military stocks, some of which remained in Palestine after the war.

Scheduled civil traffic was kept to a minimum during the war. Only one train ran daily on the main El Qantara – Haifa line, with one connecting train each to Jerusalem and Jaffa. Potential travelers were asked to only undertake trips that could not be postponed. This was supported by a drastic fare increase in 1943. Local traffic was stopped. Sleeping and dining cars were taken out of service in 1942, but the sleeping cars were used again from 1943. The dining cars reappeared in February 1945. In 1947 or 1948 the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits withdrew its vehicles entirely from Palestine, presumably to Egypt. By May 1944, the situation had eased to the point that one train could be offered between Haifa and Lydda and two additional passenger trains between Jaffa and Jerusalem.

The last few years under British mandate

Kitson K-Class 1'D'2 tank locomotive and freight train on the Jaffa – Jerusalem line, after a Jewish attack, 1946
Yarmuk bridge of the 1050 mm railway line in the Jezreel valley after the Jewish Palmach attack, 16./17. June 1946

Framework

At the end of the Second World War, PR found itself in an unfamiliar situation of having considerable income at its disposal. The transfers from military agencies contributed to this, as did the greatly reduced car traffic due to gasoline rationing. The improved situation turned out to be a flash in the pan. The domestic political situation, which immediately deteriorated after the end of the war, also stood in the way of consolidating the railway.

The hopes, solidarity and support by Jewish Palestinians in production and as soldiers for Britain in the war against the Third Reich , would move the mandate power to facilitate immigration again, were disappointed. In complete contrast to the Arab party, for which the violent acts of Arab insurgents continued to pay off politically, because from the bloody experience with it, the mandate power retained the restrictive immigration rules. In view of the British rejection of survivors of the German extermination of the Jews in Europe, who strived for the Holy Land alienated from their home countries, the position of Jewish Palestinians in relation to the Mandate power hardened.

The British mandate acted helplessly and aimlessly. It was now mainly exposed to attacks by Jewish terrorists who concluded that the mandate only honors violence, not cooperation. The final British withdrawal from Palestine was like fleeing.

The railroad was again a sought-after target for terrorists ( Hagana , Irgun ). Arab terrorists raided trains and stole weapons and money, and destroyed signaling and telecommunications equipment in train stations. Night operations in Haifa had to be stopped as early as 1945. Trains blew up, the repair (Aw) and signal boxes in Lydda were the target of an attack that damaged several locomotives. In January 1946, Jewish terrorists attacked a train near Binjamina with wage money that made off for £ 35,000, and in June 1946 it hit the Av Kishon.

In September 1946 the Irgun blew up half of Haifa East Station, PR administration and terminus of the HBT line and the Jezreel valley railway . On the night of June 16-17 , 1946, Jewish saboteurs blew up the second bridge in the Jarmuk Gorge of the Jezreel Railway. This interrupted the continuous rail traffic to Syria. The trains still ran to Samach, from there you had to travel on by road until the invading armies of neighboring countries put an end to this in 1948 and started the war for Israel's independence .

Some of the PR headquarters had been relocated to the Beit Churi in Haifa, where British railroad workers took care of the handover of operations to local employees, mostly Jewish Palestinians. Seen from the center of Palestinian rail traffic in Haifa, British rail workers gradually withdrew on distant routes or sections of the route in the direction of Haifa, in order to disembark the British, their belongings and movable material of the Mandate power via the port of Haifa until the end to be able to. Later in 1948, the Beit Churi went up in flames in the war for Israel's independence.

After the British withdrawal, in places predominantly inhabited by Arab Palestinians, railway systems and rolling stock were left to their own devices due to a lack of orderly powers and in view of the violence, despite calls from the PR headquarters. With the help of the Histadrut , the head office successfully appealed to Jewish Palestinians in rail operations, to their sense of duty and trust in the future of the railways, despite the danger to their lives, to continue working on tracks, stations and in the Aw in as many places as possible and to protect equipment and rolling stock and to keep them operational where traffic has stopped.

Former Jaffa Railway Station as a commercial and catering site, 2009

The stations in Ramla , Atlit and Rosh HaAjin were badly damaged by attacks, and the Rechovot railway attack with a sticky bomb in 1948 resulted in high blood tolls. Dozens of people died in the attacks. The rail traffic was interrupted again and again. In between there was a ten-day general strike to survive. At this time, traffic between Tel Aviv and Jaffa had to be stopped - for good, as it later turned out. After years of using Jaffa station as a military depot, it is now open to the public again.

business

The Palestine Railways were represented at the first European timetable conference after the war in Paris in June 1946. The British military authorities, however, refused to open the continuous rail line on the HBT section of the route from Istanbul to Cairo. From 1946 on , the Taurus Express ran twice a week with through coaches to Tripoli and then on the road to Haifa. In 1948 the through cars to Tripoli are no longer listed. From June the route north of Azzib was closed. It should never be used again. Even in 1949, the timetable conference - contrary to all the political upheavals that had taken place in the Middle East - still regarded the interruption as provisional.

vehicles

Locomotives

The PR initially took over the vehicle inventory of PMR. 42 PMR locomotives were old British London and North Western Railway freight locomotives with a C wheel arrangement. They did not work well in Palestine and were scrapped in 1922. 36 PMR locomotives were old British London and South Western Railway freight locomotives, also with the C wheel arrangement. They worked better in Palestine, and in 1920 PR took over 29 of them, 22 of which were scrapped in 1928. PR's last seven LSWR locomotives were taken out of service in 1936 and scrapped in 1944/45. Six PMR locomotives were small tank locomotives of Manning Wardle with the wheel arrangement C for shunting. PR took over four of them as the  M series .

50 PMR locomotives with a 2'C wheel arrangement were built by Baldwin Locomotive Works in the USA in 1918 for the British War Department; PR took them over as the H series. Armstrong Whitworth in England converted six locomotives of this series into tank locomotives with a 2'C'1 wheel arrangement in 1926; PR called them the H2 series. PR converted five Baldwin 2'C locomotives into tank locomotives in 1937/38. These were given the 2'C'2 wheel arrangement and PR called them the H3 series.

The first locomotives delivered for PR were six kitson & company tank locomotives with a 1'D'2 wheel arrangement. They arrived in Palestine in 1922 and were the PR series K. They were intended for use on the mountain route to Jerusalem. In order to use these heavy machines, the superstructure had to be retrofitted and the wooden sleepers replaced by steel sleepers, because the locomotives pushed the rails apart with their coupled drive wheels in the tight bends. Garratt locomotives would have been ideal , but these were rejected as too expensive.

In 1934 Nasmyth, Wilson built three shunting locomotives with the C wheel arrangement: this is how the PR series began. PR was satisfied with this powerful tank locomotive and bought eight of this series from 1935–1938.

North British Locomotive Co. P-Class 2'C, built in 1935, in service with Israel Railways on a Haifa turntable, 1950

The last delivery of locomotives for mainline traffic in peacetime reached the PR in 1935. There were six locomotives from the North British Locomotive Company ( Glasgow ), with a 2'C wheel arrangement: they became the PR class P. They were before the second World War II the most powerful locomotives of the PR and pulled both the long-distance passenger trains between Haifa and Egypt as well as the heaviest freight trains .

The somewhat weak locomotive inventory of the PR was supplemented by locomotives from the British War Ministry from the beginning of the Second World War. There were two different classes of 1'D locomotives. On the one hand there were about 30 older locomotives from the time before the First World War that JG Robinson had built for the Great Central Railway . After the Second World War none of these machines remained in the PR inventory.

The second series consisted of freight locomotives designed by Sir William Stanier for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway , which had been introduced there in 1935 as Class 8F. The locomotives were built in large series for the War Ministry. Of these machines, 24 were rented by PR, 23 of which were ultimately taken over by Israel Railways (IR). The 24th was isolated in Tulkarm, then West Bank, during the Israeli War of Liberation in 1948, where the railway ran a short distance over the area that was added to the Kingdom of Jordan . There it rusted to itself, came into Israeli possession in the Six Day War in 1967 and was scrapped around 1973.

US locomotives were also used again: approx. 85 1'D'1 Mikados of the USATC class S 200 by Lima , Alco and Baldwin for the US Army in cooperation with British authorities . After the war they were withdrawn from the PR network again, many of them to Turkey.

On the other hand, two locomotives with the wheel arrangement C (built in 1942) of the USATC class S 100 remained in the PR stocks, these were manufactured in large numbers in the USA. Eight Davenport and three Vulcan were used in Palestine and PR has taken over two Davenport machines: Number 20 and 21. Number 20 pulled the special train that ran on the IR on February 27, 1959 to mark the end of steam operations.

Since around 1943, diesel locomotives also drove for the first time for PR. Built by Whitcomb , they developed 650 hp. In addition, numerous other locomotives drove on the PR network, but they only appeared as single copies or were only used for a short time.

At the beginning of 1942 work began on converting the steam locomotives to oil firing, as coal had to be brought in by sea and was difficult to obtain. The changeover was not a great success, the chosen system was a temporary solution. The number of locomotive failures rose so dramatically that PR was on the verge of collapse. In the financial year 1943/44 - the worst - the locomotive performance between stays in the repair shop was only 2824 km with a total of 1265 cases of damage.

Passenger cars

Luxury saloon car No. 98
A J&J line passenger train uphill from Lydda to Jerusalem, 1947

The passenger cars taken over by PMR came from England: 13 from the London and South Western Railway and 17 from the Midland Railway . Already converted for the medical service in England, after the war in Palestine they were converted again for passenger transport, some as 1st class cars. The comfort is said to have been rather spartan. Some of these cars still existed in the 1970s. In addition, there were some rented Egyptian wagons that were left behind from the war and the few vehicles of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits.

The first coaches ordered by the PR itself were delivered by the Birmingham Railway Carriage and Wagon Company in 1922 (the only ones with a steel structure): 10 compartment cars, 1st class, 9 open seating cars, 3rd class and 2  saloon cars . No. 98 of the latter has been preserved and is exhibited in the Israel Railway Museum in Haifa. The Metropolitan Railway Carriage and Wagon Company also delivered 19 1st, 2nd and 3rd class cars in the same year. The rented vehicles were then returned to ESR. After it became clear that the volume of traffic in 1st and 2nd class was only low, only 3rd class cars were ordered: The last of these vehicles were not taken out of service by the IR until 1965.

All vehicles were usually 4-axle bogie wagons with a steel frame, wooden structure and bellows. In the 1st class compartments there were four seats with leather upholstery, in the 2nd class there were six rattan seats, and the 3rd class had wooden benches in open seating for eight or ten passengers per seating group. Nevertheless, there was obviously still enough space to take a camel or a donkey with you. Vermin was such a serious problem on the PR trains.

Railcar

In 1928, Sentinel Cammell procured two two-part steam railcars with an upright boiler for suburban traffic in Haifa. Soon known as the "Primus stove", they did not meet the expectations placed in them in the company. In particular, their transport capacity turned out to be too low at peak times. This induced train drivers to stop in front of the platform where passengers could get off and to pass the platform with passengers willing to board without stopping. The boilers were dismantled by 1945 at the latest and the vehicles ran as wagons in passenger trains.

Freight wagons

The PR freight wagons were also initially taken over from the PMR fleet and were relatively primitive: loosely coupled two-axle vehicles without brakes - as has long been the norm in the United Kingdom. New buildings for the PR then received screw couplings and vacuum brakes. Due to the inadequate pulling power of the available locomotives, freight trains to Jerusalem had to be partially relocated to reduce their weight, which meant a delay in operations of up to six hours.

The end of PR

Southern gate of the Rosh HaNikra tunnels on the HBT line between Israel and Lebanon. The stone above commemorates the engineers of the South African Army, which completed it in 1942.

The PR officially ceased operations on May 14, 1948, the day the United Kingdom officially resigned its mandate and the last British High Commissioner left the country. In the weeks before, however, no more trains had run. This also meant the final end for the Hejaz Railway. The State of Israel was proclaimed on May 14, 1948. With that, the railway administration also passed into the hands of the new state, which took over the existing PR as far as it came to rest in its national territory, and the Israel Railways were founded.

Established in 1996

In 1996 the Palestine Railways were re-established as a railway company for the Palestinian Autonomous Areas. In theory, it took over the railroad in the Gaza Strip . The route is about 50 km long and extends from the Egyptian border station Rafah to the Israeli border station Erez . The route is partially structurally no longer available, there were no more vehicles, and rail traffic was never started.

  • photos

  • Tender of the 1935 North British 2'C steam locomotive No. 62

  • Palestine Railways shape signal from the 1930s near Haifa-Ost with shunting arm from the 1950s from Israel Railways

  • Haifa East freight yard with Sherman tanks on two flat car trains, 1946

  • The Yarmuk Bridge of the Jezreel Railway in ruins

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rothschild, chap. 1, Section 1: (H).
  2. ↑ Rothschild, chap. 1, Section 1: (H) c).
  3. ↑ Rothschild, chap. 1, Section 1: (H) e), f).
  4. ↑ Rothschild, chap. 1, Section 1: (H) d).
  5. ↑ Cotterell, p. 127.
  6. ↑ Cotterell, pp. 29-30.
  7. ↑ Cotterell, p. 49.
  8. ↑ Cotterell, p. 50.
  9. ↑ Cotterell, p. 48.
  10. ↑ Cotterell, p. 55.
  11. ↑ Cotterell, pp. 53-54.
  12. ↑ Cotterell, pp. 68-69.
  13. ↑ Cotterell, pp. 69-70.
  14. ↑ Cotterell, pp. 70-71.
  15. ↑ Cotterell, pp. 71, 134.
  16. ↑ Cotterell, p. 71.