On ground littered with bullet and artillery casings and the remains of rockets, the Qadam train station stands like a forgotten city, hinting at an illustrious past.
The 50-acre depot in Damascus, once a pivotal terminus on the historic Hejaz Railway, was a center for locomotive and carriage construction and repair, complete with ironsmiths, housing for staff, a mosque, and baths.
In 2025, it resembles a train graveyard. Its basalt stone buildings are collapsing. Burnt-out carriages and diesel engines lie on their sides, casualties of Syria’s 14-year civil war.
Why We Wrote This
More than a century after Arab revolutionaries blew up the Ottomans’ prized Hejaz Railway, located in the geographic heart of the Middle East, Syria’s new government is pushing full steam ahead on its revival. It’s not just nostalgia.
Yet more than a century since Arab revolutionaries and the famed British intelligence officer T.E. Lawrence, popularly known as Lawrence of Arabia, blew up the Hejaz in a revolt against the Ottoman Empire, plans are underway to put the railway back on track.
Key to this grand reclamation is Syria, the starting point of the historic Damascus-Medina line, located at the geographic heart of the Middle East.
Now with the country emerging from the civil war and dictatorship that oversaw the railway’s rapid decline, a new government is pushing full steam ahead on its revival.
State transport authorities hope to have the first trains arriving in southern Syria from neighboring Jordan within a year. But from costs, to theft, to the lingering effects of wartime destruction, they face an uphill battle in putting their plans in motion.
Hejaz heritage
The Hejaz Railway, an engineering marvel, was built by the Ottoman Empire in 1908 to link its administrative center of Istanbul to the Arabian Peninsula it controlled, facilitating the movement of goods, soldiers, and Hajj pilgrims.
But because of World War I and the sabotage by Arab revolutionaries and T.E. Lawrence, only the segment from Damascus to Medina was completed.
At Qadam station, a museum proudly unveiled in 2008 to mark the centenary of the railroad was looted during the civil war and is now a burnt-out shell. The remaining artifacts are stored in boxes in a small storage room. One first-class car is still intact, its plush leather seats and wood paneling caked with dust.
Standing amid the twisted steel, custodian and former conductor Mazen al-Malla hopes to ride the rails again.
“God willing, when the track is repaired, I will be at the wheels of the first train,” says Mr. Malla, who has worked for the railway for 35 years. He steered the last Hejaz train in Syria, a tourist trip from Amman to Damascus, in September 2011. He has been dreaming of its revival ever since. “This is my life. I am excited to be back on the rails.”
It is also a family trade. His father, who was born in the Qadam station, ran the train, while his grandfather was the conductor for trips to Saudi Arabia in the 1930s. The Malla family history with the Hejaz covers 90 of the rail’s 117 years.
“This is our heritage as Syrians and the wider Levant. This is our inheritance,” says Mr. Malla, who lives at the station, a few feet away from an abandoned locomotive.
But it is more than just nostalgia fueling the railway’s return. There are also economic incentives to get the Hejaz back on track.
Around 220 of the Hejaz’s 800 miles of rail track snake across southern Syria and Damascus and toward Lebanon. One abandoned line runs to Haifa, in Israel.
Until 2011, freight was regularly transported between Syria and Jordan: Syrian furniture, woodwork, and textiles to Jordan, and Jordanian phosphates and cement to Syria.
Today, relinking Damascus to Amman – and eventually to the port of Aqaba – could help accelerate Syria’s recovery. There’s a massive need for raw materials to aid Syria’s postwar reconstruction, and Syrian manufacturers want to reach outside markets.
Uphill ride
Restoring the Hejaz, however, will be an engineering challenge.
Between Daraa in southern Syria and Damascus, 25 miles of track have been stolen, allegedly by former Assad regime forces, to be melted down for war use and profit.
But because the Hejaz rail gauge is narrower than modern rails, Syrian authorities will need custom-built track to reconnect to the extensive existing Hejaz track in Jordan.
Yet with the old rail factory at Qadam station in disrepair, the know-how to forge, repair, and maintain Ottoman rail is scarce.
“The rail has suffered from destruction and a lack of repairs, but renovating is a very good opportunity for both Damascus and Amman,” says Mohamed al-Ajami, general manager of the Hejaz and Syrian Railways.
“Syria is a strategic transit point due to its geographic position on the Mediterranean,” connecting Iraq, Jordan, and the Arabian Peninsula with Turkey and Europe. “We hope to have Syria as an essential transit point for global transport,” he says, “but it will be a massive undertaking.”
Within one year, rail authorities aim to renovate Syria’s southernmost tracks in order to resume trips from Amman to Daraa. In two years, they hope to have laid enough track to resume travel from Daraa to Deir Ali, south of the Syrian capital, and then to Damascus itself.
In the meantime, stone Ottoman-era stations remain damaged or destroyed.
The black basalt station in Daraa, the second-largest in Syria, is in ruins. A bombed-out stationmaster’s hut and a burnt arrivals office are all that remain.
Three dozen rusted cargo and passenger cars line up on tracks submerged in sand.
To finance the Hejaz’s resurrection, Syrian transport authorities are pulling out all the stops to attract investors, and are in talks with the Jordanian Hejaz Railway authorities on reconnecting the two countries.
But until it is put back on track, the historic rail lies dormant, a forgotten time capsule from a turning point in world history.
Mr. Malla, the veteran conductor, stands by a line of parked century-old locomotives that once ran on the Hejaz: coal-, steam-, and diesel-powered German and Swiss engines.
“This isn’t just a rail line; these are historic treasures,” Mr. Malla says, patting the smokebox of a 1918 locomotive. “I cannot wait until we can transport the world back in time again.”
