Société des Chemins de fer Ottomans économiques de Beyrouth-Damas-Hauran

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The Société des Chemins de fer Ottomans économiques de Beyrouth-Damas-Hauran built the first railways in what is now Syria and was then part of the Ottoman Empire .

society

It was a French company. From 1891 she was the holder of an Ottoman concession for the Beirut - Damascus and Damascus - Muzeirib routes .

stretch

Hauran Railway

First of all, the Damascus – Muzeirib line, the Hauran Railway , which runs in the flat terrain of the Hauran and therefore technically easy to build , was built and opened in 1894.

When the Ottoman Empire planned the Hejaz Railway , it tried to buy up the Hauran Railway , but this failed because of the excessive demands made by the then owner, the Société Ottomane du Chemin de fer Damas-Hamah et Prolongements (DHP) . So the Hejaz Railway was laid in parallel and there were two railway lines between Damascus and Muzeirib that competed until the First World War. Although the neighboring Hejaz Railway chose the same gauge, there was never a track connection due to the competitive situation between the two railways before the First World War .

At the beginning of the First World War, all foreign railways owned by companies that had their headquarters in now hostile countries were confiscated, including the Hauran Railway, whose operation was transferred to the Hejaz Railway. The Hauran Railway was immediately dismantled in order to reuse the material for driving the railway in Palestine in the direction of the Suez Canal to be attacked.

Lebanon Railway

On August 3, 1895, the connection from Damascus to Beirut on the Mediterranean went into operation. The route crosses the Lebanon Mountains and Anti-Lebanon . It is 143 km long. Crossing the mountains was technically complex, with switchbacks and 33 km of rack and pinion sections . The speeds to be achieved and the load to be attached per train were strictly limited and the capacity of the train was therefore low.

The Lebanon Railway was destroyed on the Lebanese side during the Lebanese civil war between 1975 and 1990. On the Syrian side, operations have largely ceased today.

Gauge

The tracks of the Société des Chemins de fer Ottomans économiques de Beyrouth-Damas-Hauran were laid out in a track width of 1050 mm. There are various more or less plausible explanations for this unusual measure. It is not certain whether or which of them apply.

  • The gauge was said to have been taken over from the Algerian area and French colonial tradition. After the French style, the gauge of rail center to bar center there was measured, not the same widely used by rail inside edge to inside edge rail. Therefore, according to the original French classification, it was actually a 1100 mm track.
  • The sleepers, which, like most of the superstructure material for the Hauran Railway, had to be laboriously brought across Lebanon by mules, were accidentally perforated to 1050 mm instead of 1000 mm. The rolling stock was then converted to this gauge. However, that sounds impractical: A new perforation would certainly have been more economical than re-gauging the vehicles.
  • A draftsman accidentally entered 1050 mm instead of 1000 mm in plans. That also seems unlikely. It is very likely that such a mistake would have been noticed at a very early stage of construction and could have been corrected.

The same gauge was subsequently chosen for the Hejaz Railway , probably in view of the attempted but unsuccessful purchase of the Hauran Railway by the Ottoman Empire.

crossing

The Société des Chemins de fer Ottomans économiques de Beyrouth-Damas-Hauran merged with a Belgian company at the end of the 1890s, which brought in its own route concessions from the years before 1891 for the area around Damascus, and now traded under the name Société ottomane du Chemin de fer Damas – Hamah et Prolongements (DHP) .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Metzeltin, p. 110, alternatively mentions the name “ Societe de Chemins de fer en Syrie ”, which, however, is otherwise not mentioned in the literature.
  2. ↑ Metzeltin, p. 110f.

literature