Monday 26 September 2016

Saudi Arabia's Abandoned Hejaz Railway

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The Hejaz railway that ran from Damascus to Medina in Saudi Arabia. It was one of the principal railroads of the Ottoman Turkish Empire and a vital route across the desert. The railway was built in 1900 at the behest of the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II.

The railway reached only as far as Medina when the First World War broke out and all construction works came to a grinding halt. Today, large sections of the railway lie abandoned in the desert with tracks swallowed up by the sand, and carriages and engines toppled over and overgrown with shrubs.

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