A railway that died in 1920 just got a 2026 reboot - and it could change how you cross the Middle East

In 1900, getting from Damascus to Medina took 40 days on a camel, through mountain passes where bandits routinely killed the pilgrims trying. By 1908 the same trip took three days, on a train that cut through terrain no railway had ever attempted. And almost nobody knows how the line got built, because the only part that made it into the movies is the part where it gets blown up.

The first crowdfunding campaign in history had rails

The idea didn't even come from the government. It came from Muhammad Insha Allah, an Indian Muslim journalist, who pitched it in 1897 - and Sultan Abdulhamid II loved it, with one tiny problem. The Ottoman Empire was broke. Properly broke, half-owned by European banks, and every railway it had ever built came with foreign money and foreign strings.

So the sultan did something nobody had ever tried: he asked the public. Not his public. The public - Muslims everywhere on Earth.

And it worked. About a third of the entire cost arrived as donations, from Singapore, Persia, South Africa, North America. People sold their jewelry. Britain ran propaganda in India and Egypt to stop its own subjects from chipping in, terrified of what the line meant for its grip on the Red Sea. The money came anyway. 

They built the internet of 1908, with shovels

The numbers are absurd. 1,300 km in eight years, through some of the meanest terrain on the planet, under German chief engineer Heinrich August Meissner and a workforce of around 5,000 - much of it Ottoman soldiers swapping rifles for shovels. The bridges were engineered against flash floods and drifting sand; plenty are still standing.

And before the rails went down, a telegraph line from Damascus to Medina went up. The railway shipped with its own comms network pre-installed. They were laying fiber along the highway in 1901.

The line never reached Mecca - it stopped at Medina, 400 km short. The war gets the blame, but there was another reason too: a deal with the Bedouin tribes, whose entire economy was escorting pilgrim caravans, to end the track before the holy city so they'd keep the last leg of the business. The network stopped exactly where it threatened local jobs. Regulators have been drawing that same line ever since, just with more paperwork.

How to kill a network (Lawrence did it best)

Everyone knows Lawrence of Arabia blew up this railway. Almost nobody knows he was careful never to finish the job - a barely functioning line suited him far better than a dead one.

His crews used "tulip" charges that twisted rails so badly they could never be straightened, and blew bridges so they shattered instead of collapsing - maximum repair hours per kilo of dynamite. But he never cut the line for good. It chained thousands of Ottoman troops to guard posts and repair gangs, far from the real war.

His trick never went away. You don't beat a network by switching it off - you beat it by making it unreliable, until everyone who depends on it starts planning around its failure. The same move happens today, minus the dynamite: throttled connections, blocked top-up apps, 24-hour activation delays. The slow strangling of travel eSIMs runs on Lawrence's exact arithmetic. Degrade, don't destroy.

By 1920 the main line was dead, and so was the empire that built it. The grandest network of its era worked in full for less than 12 years.

A dead railway kept making history anyway

In 1920, a man named Abdullah - son of the Arab Revolt's leader - stepped off a Hejaz train in Jordan. Within a year he'd founded the country. Jordanians will tell you that the railway delivered the man who built their kingdom. 

Syria kept bits of the line running until 2011, when the civil war began in Daraa - a railway town, where a 1914 Berlin-built locomotive still sits in a shed with a mortar hole in the roof. Since then, treasure hunters have been digging up the stations chasing a legend of buried Ottoman gold, and out in the southern desert the rails themselves have been stolen for scrap.

And in 2018 Saudi Arabia quietly finished the sultan's homework: the Haramain High Speed Railway, 450 km, 300 km/h, Mecca to Medina in two hours. 

And now they're switching it back on

The past nine months are the fastest this file has moved since 1908, and the pace is accelerating:

• September 2025: Turkey, Syria and Jordan sign the first agreement to revive the line, months after the fall of the Assad regime reopened Syria to its neighbors.
  
• April 2026: the three countries sign a trilateral transport memorandum in Amman. The division of labor is already concrete - Syria rebuilds a missing ~30 km stretch of track with Turkish support, Jordan takes over maintaining the locomotives, and Turkey's development agency is meanwhile restoring the old Hejaz station in Amman as a museum.
  
• April 22: Saudi Arabia publicly joins the conversation. Transport minister Saleh al-Jasser announces a joint feasibility study with Turkey - a corridor through Syria and Jordan - to be completed by the end of 2026.
  
• June 9: Turkey and Saudi Arabia sign two memorandums in Riyadh covering railways, logistics, infrastructure and training, formally putting the Gulf's biggest economy on board.

Turkish crews are already repairing track near the Syrian border that's been out of service for nearly 15 years. Turkey has also run two trial freight shipments all the way to Saudi Arabia via Iraq to prove an overland route works. 

Saudi Arabia's national rail network already reaches the Jordanian border at the al-Haditha crossing, so the southern end of the puzzle physically exists. The build order is set: Turkey to Aleppo first, then the existing Aleppo-Damascus-Jordan line, then the link south to Riyadh - with long-term maps running through Oman to the Indian Ocean.

The why is just as much about 2026 as the route is. Attacks and tensions around the Strait of Hormuz have spent this year reminding everyone how fragile the region's shipping chokepoints are, and governments suddenly want overland alternatives the way they once wanted ports. 

Can you actually ride it? Sooner than you'd think

You don't have to wait for the diplomats to taste it. Jordan already runs trips on its surviving stretch of the original line - antique carriages rolling out of Amman's Ottoman-era station from spring to autumn, the last piece of the 1908 railway still open to passengers. It's slow, loud, and completely wonderful, and right now it's the closest thing on Earth to a ticket on the Hejaz Railway.

Nobody is selling tickets on the full route yet, the first phase is freight, and rail promises in this region have a habit of staying promises. But the early pieces are real, and the day a passenger train rolls from Damascus into Amman after 15 frozen years will be one of the great travel moments of the decade. So if the rebuilt line ever runs from Istanbul toward Medina, make sure you get on it.

Until the trains run, you'll be crossing those borders the modern way - here's how to avoid roaming charges when you travel, wherever the line eventually takes you.